Clarissa Pinkola Estes Quotes

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: 'If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.'

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness.

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.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

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

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

If you have the ideas, and you're a creative person, then you don't really differentiate in how your ideas manifest themselves.

I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

When I work on a part, one of the things I love to do is to put together a collage of things, stuff I see or stuff that inspires me, images, whatever.

As an artist, you find at different times you want to do different things.

I think there's something beautiful about the art of making art, and it just will live and breathe.

Curiosity is a great weapon for the artist.

Creative instinct is personal.

I understand, as an artist as well as a producer, the need for there to be mystery and surprise.

If I get a commission, it's like a flood of creative thought and energy.