John Dryden Quotes

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

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.

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.

We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry.

The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day.

When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.

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.

But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

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

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

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.

I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.

I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.

I've got so much material; like, it feels as if every day I'm coming up with so many riffs.