Creative State Quotes

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.

While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.

When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, I feel a very special connection. I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.

I called it 'Cloud 9' because that's the place I want to take people when they are listening to my music. It's also where I am when I make music.

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

The secret of artistic creation and the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of 'participation mystique' - to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual.

Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.

While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.

Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

The state of mind of the photographer creating is a blank. I might add that this condition exists only at special times, namely when looking for pictures. -Something keeps him from falling off curbs, down open manholes, into bumpers of skidding trucks while in this condition but goes off duty at other times. . . . This is a very special kind of blank. A very active state of mind really, it is a very receptive state. . .

When I make a good beat, I'm possessed. I'm not on earth!

Art is foremost a state of mind, and only secondarily a problem of form.

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

Work up imagination to the state of vision.

When I'm writing, I look like a fool because the parts are moving through me and I'm crying and laughing and making faces.