Jack Canfield Quotes

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

The idea is in my head to put it down is nothing.

Some of the best writing I've done, whether I'm shooting a story or thinking of a script, I write it in my head as I'm running. Running literally jogs my brain.

The way that I live is in between the dual experiences of the tragedy mask and the comedy mask. I feel that I write best and think best in between those two masks.

I have a little pocket journal. I just put the pen on the paper and just go.

It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

I do more writing by myself than with anybody else. My best thing is sitting...around somewhere with a guitar, and having an idea. You never know where it'd come from. Songwriting is a God-given talent.

I think it's really important to not talk about how you're going to release something until you've finished it. People are like, "What are we going to make? What are we going to do with it?" and it's just like, "I don't know, we're just making music. Then we'll talk." You can't always write something you're happy with; you can't force it.

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.... Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with a blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what happened as if in a revelation.

Songwriting is ... all about intuition - this thing pops into your head for a reason and it's up to you to follow it. It's like there's a spirit, or intuitive network, that comes through all of us, but most people don't take the time to think about it or remember it. These little things pop into our heads - it's just a process of intuition. The initial thought comes in a baby state, and you work on that some more.

I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.

It sounds like I'm channeling or something, and I don't really fully understand what it is. I'll get a piece of paper and write down what I think is coming to me. And I'll play it once. Whether it's being recorded or not, I can then usually remember it for a sometimes shocking amount of time.

I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

Sometimes the best ideas I have are in my bathtub or in my bed or in my dreams early in the morning before waking up ... I'm like a TV antennae, I catch it all and do it my way.

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

I think the best songs that come to me are ones that you sort of listen for. The ones - when I listen to some of my old stuff, I can tell when I had a good idea, but I forced it through, and I can hear myself - the bit that I've written, which sounds clunkier than the stuff that just sort of comes.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.