Erik Larson Quotes

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

I guess I'll just slip into the studio after the next time with the Muses, and then just keel over and die.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

If I feel like I've completely drained every ounce of energy out of me for this song, and I can't go any further with it, then I stop, even if the song is unfinished. Most of the time, when it's finished, it's because I've used every ounce of me to write it.

My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party.

Most designers work up to a peak. They do some great stuff, and then it's just junk.

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now!

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

Sometimes as an artist you get wrapped up in what you are doing and you can't be objective.

I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just... lame.

Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

You can't really think about more than one movie at a time. You're thinking about it consciously, and the subconscious is working too, and if you cram too much into your head, you don't get any ideas in the shower.

I wake up every day thinking, 'I just can't do it anymore.' There's nothing left to say, and I'm completely dry. And then I get in the room with somebody and they say the right thing, and I'm on again.

I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

It's not like I've got 100 ideas. I finish a book, and I've got none.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

Whenever I finish a film, I feel that this is the worst film that I have made. This is bound to happen because while writing, directing and editing a film, I would have lived it 5000 times. Naturally, one tends to loose objectivity.

When you open your mind up, and you go into a creative state, you can't just switch if off. When you have an idea, a creative impulse, and then you ignore it, it can keep you up when you just want to go to your bed - which is why it's great to have voice recorders on your phone!

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.