Quotes / Creator Breakdown

Dark is a valid direction to take something, but I think you have to be in a particular place, mentally, to stay there for a while.

— Sean Howard, Ten Things I Learned Writing AMD

That's Paul. Apparently he was under strain at that period.

— John Lennon on "Carry That Weight"

This is a little sad, but Jeph Loeb's son had passed away a few years before, and I believe it had affected his writing. I'd be open to your take if you disagree on this, but I think if you look at the stuff he was writing before, like Batman and Daredevil with artist Tim Sale, and then you compare it to stuff like The Ultimates, Ultimatum, his work on Hulk with the Red Hulk, I think that things for a few years there were definitely more cynical and dark. That's my two cents. I think it affected his writing and it might've led to Ultimatum being more violent and ugly than it needed to be.

— ComicTropes on Ultimatum

The doctors told me I had to quit. I was so sick; I was bleeding from about everywhere. I mean, my stomach was gone; my head was gone; my body was gone. They said, 'You just have to stop.' And this is about two-thirds way through the third season... And I called the studio, and I told them. Of course they immediately sued me. ('Breach of contract.')

— James Garner on quitting The Rockford Files

From the inception of WCW to about a year-and-a-half there with Jim Herd was the worst time of my career ('til Biscoff came along). "Ric Flair", he was just gone from '89 'til I went to WWE. They cracked me. I'm not shy about telling that. I make light of it, and I make fun of it, but they almost had me with the Sigourney Weaver disease where I couldn't walk around the house without touching the wall. I was that cracked.

— Ric Flair

Gen Urobuchi wants to write stories that can warm people's hearts.
Those who know about my creative history will probably furrow their brows and think this is a sick joke. Honestly, I have trouble believing it myself. For when I start typing out words on the keyboard, the stories my brain comes up with are always full of madness and despair.
The truth is, I haven't always been this way. I have often written pieces that didn't have a perfect ending, but by the last chapter the protagonist would still possess a belief that "Although there will be many hardships to come, I still have to hold on".
But ever since I don't know when, I can no longer write works like this... At some point, Gen Urobuchi lost that power. He still hasn't recovered. The 'tragedy syndrome' is still continuing within me. Is this a terminal disease? Should I give up on the pure "warrior of love" that I have longed for? Or mount a pallid battle steed and reincarnate into a bearer of the plague... could it be that I can only create pieces that give men courage and hope in my next life? (When I wrote this, I accidentally wrote 'courage' as 'lingering ghosts'. I guess that's what I get for using IME — Ah, I just wrote "IME" as 'hatred'... is there no way out of this for me?)

— Gen Urobuchi, Afterword to Volume 1 of Fate/Zero with a lot of foreshadowing about his next work

At that time, the managers suggested that we have a psychotherapist come in. A man that meets with pro ball teams, you know — big-ego, big-dollar guys that can't get along, but have to make some kind of entity flow, so everybody else and everybody can make the money. And, uh, I actually said, 'I think that this is really fucking lame — weak — that we cannot get together. Us! Look: the biggest heavy band of all time! The things we've been through and decisions we've made... about squillions of dollars and squillions of people... and this? We can't get over this?

— Jason Newsted, Some Kind of Monster

Halfway though production, [Yasumi] Matsuno resigned from Square Enix, citing health reasons. That the actual reason was a nervous collapse is practically common knowledge, though you'll never heard Square Enix say so. (Matsuno's not taking a paid vacation to recuperate and choosing to get the hell away from Square Enix instead speaks volumes.) Working on Final Fantasy XII actually caused its director and executive producer to cave in on himself.

— Pat R., "The Twelfth Final Fantasy"

When I learned some years ago that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Will I be able to resume Alatriste as it was and not make an Alatriste that is different, damaged, far from the imagination of the reader and my past self?

— Arturo Pérez-Reverte

"And if I could boil this movie down to one single word, it would be: 'bitter'. Like, if there's something I've noticed about this movie all the way through... it's that it's very bitter. It's bitter about everyone who hates it, it's bitter about any and all criticism that it's probably ever received, it's bitter for getting cancelled[...]Here's where most of the bitterness comes in, like, they clearly hate South Park... like, if I didn't know any better, it seems like the creators are blaming South Park for them getting cancelled."

— The Mysterious Mr. Enter in his commentary on his review of the Drawn Together movie.

I've given up!
I've had enough!
I took the time!
I overthought!
I paced around!
I fucked it up!
I lost all hope that I could make art!

This fog in my mind won't part!
Got thoughts cooked up, but the oven door's stuck!
Nothing good will ever come out of this rut!
Starting to wish that I was cracked up!

—"Insania", Qbomb

This is an entry in my diary
On the 12th of December 2017
Music made me feel nothing
I made some anyway out of anger
For 24 hours
If albums testify eras
This is just a day

— Madeon, 12122017

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