Jon Hopkins Quotes

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

Once we start shooting, it's in there. You're trying to get into a place where you rise to the work, rather than make it manageable or make it work for you.

And when you try too hard, it doesn't work. Try grabbing something quickly and precisely with a tensed-up arm; then relax and try it again. Try doing something with a tense mind. The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard-one that thinks too much.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

When the writing is going well, I'm obsessive. I don't shower, I don't take phone calls, I hardly respond to text messages, I don't do email. I take breaks only to read, and usually I read poetry. When it's not going well, I just lie in bed and eat chocolate.

I don’t think there’s ever what could be called a "chilled state" in my head.

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.

[On creating] And you get that little endorphin buzz, it's great. Why do you think Einstein looked like that? I don't think he was going "You know this is some dynamite weed! It's all relative you know."

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.

I wonder if Watson is in the relaxed state of mind he's in

Don Quixote followed nature, and being satisfied with his first sleep, did not solicit more. As for Sancho, he never wanted a second, for the first lasted him from night to morning, indicating a sound body and a mind free from care; but his master, being unable to sleep himself awakened him, saying, "I am amazed, Sancho, at the torpor of thy soul; it seems as if thou wert made of marble or brass, insensible of emotion or sentiment!

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

When I'm sitting at my computer writing, I really have this fiendish smile on my face. I am not thinking about the past or the future or how it's going to be received. I feel that I'm very lucky that way; I don't carry that particular anxiety around with me. I'm not anxiety-free by any means, but that happens to be one that I've been spared.

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

When you're home or you're working, your mind just isn't allowed to just roll on like it does when you're watching the scenery go by. You're hurdling through space but you're not really moving. ...It's that dreaminess, that ability to just get dreamy while you're looking out the window and you see something...and it makes you think of something else, and all of a sudden the words are just flowing out of you.

Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I'm aware that I'm writing. I'm aware of my surroundings. It's like shallow sleep on both ends, when you go to bed and when you wake up. But in the middle, the world is gone and I'm able to see better.

But what I didn't recognize when I was much younger was this sort of...when you're on, when you're really on, go at it.

An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. ... What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.