Merce Cunningham Quotes

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Great imaginations are apt to work from hints and suggestions, and a single moment of emotion is sometimes sufficient to create a masterpiece.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

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.

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

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

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.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

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.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

If I don't have a model in front of me, I don't have an idea.

That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

My creativity all comes from the same place. I wear one very comfortable, large hat.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

When I'm drawing a bottle or a town or a market, I transport myself there. So I start drawing everything that I'm looking at while I'm there. Here's a guy selling the meat, and he will have a hook, and you start adding things, and it's a lot of fun.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.