Issa Rae Quotes

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 don't generally listen to music while working, but sometimes music can help me get past minor writer's block.

I don't fight creativity. I don't fight against not being creative. If I'm not being creative, I'm not forcing it.

When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

I think sometimes with new characters, you can kind of hit a creative valley, and it's important to recognize when you're in that valley so you can get back out and get back to that peak.

I always have music playing in my studio when I design. It really gets me in the mood and allows me to focus.

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.

When I finished a song that I thought was good, I thought, I don't know where that came from, so I have no idea if I can do that again. I'm talking like, a hundred and fifty songs down the line. I still feel that.

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!

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

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.

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.

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few.

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 don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did it.

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.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.

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.