Johnny Cash Quotes

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

I, like a lot of people who are creative, need to step away. I can't have stuff to write about if I don't have a life. If I talk to people, hang out with my friends and hang out with my husband, I feel like I have better things to bring to the table.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

I've gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it's almost like a high. You don't want it to stop. You don't want to go to sleep for fear of missing something.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

My muse is my wife. It's not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Music is a big influence in my work and sometimes drives the energy of where I want to go.

Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.

The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just direction traffic.

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

I always prefer shooting on locations, because when I'm at home, it's harder to sort of get lost in the world of whatever you're making. It does, it does force this bond and community amongst a group.

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

Writing and creating, those things come to me on their own. I feel like... you sort of summon them and it's like allowing the universe to enter your heart in an entirely different way to what it normally does. It's like inviting that energy of the universe to enter into your craft in a way where it has a meaning.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.