Creative Processing Quotes

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition.

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

You've got to do something with all the books you've read, so you might as well imagine you've optioned them.

That sense of failure, I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

You want to make entertainment sometimes, and sometimes you want to make art, because I think the way we understand ourselves as human beings is through art, and the way we process emotions - I know I do - is through recognizing experiences on screen or in novels or in paintings.

A lot of times, I have personal things, things I go through that I may exaggerate or make a story around, but it always has a meaning related to something I've been through for real.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

My mind absorbs things in a funny way. I'm on planes quite a bit and I always take stacks and stacks of magazines and I go through them and tear pages out and fold them up, and they get stuck at the bottom of my backpack or whatever.