Creative Stimulus Quotes

I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

A large part of how an actor works and their process is the stimulation of what's around you, and none more so than in a period piece. This is a modern piece, as much as it is set in a different time, age and myth. If it wasn't relevant, it wouldn't have been made and we wouldn't be putting our energy into it. It's relevant for us today because, in some ways, it throws up a mirror to all of us. As an actor, you get stimulus and you're effected by that, whether it's costumes or funny beards or castles.

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

Everyone's looking to the urban scene for inspiration now.

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

Death is really a great blessing for humanity, without it there could be no real progress. People who lived for ever would not only hamper and discourage the young, but they would themselves lack sufficient stimulus to be creative.

I'm visually stimulated, so I watch TV, movies, even Pinterest. A song could come from something as simple as being words splashed across a billboard or changing everyday turns of phrases.

I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.

My main influence is - it's music. It lifts the spirit. I am always listening to music. And sometimes what inspires me is a little sound or some small arrangement. I really do listen to music continuously all day long - very loud, so people can't stand to be around me anymore.

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.

Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.

Berlin inspired Bowie and stirred him to write about real, important matters.

The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.

I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

An artist is he who has his center within himself. He who lacks this must choose a particular leader and mediator outside of himself, not forever, however, but only at first. For man cannot exist without a living center, and if he does not have it within himself, he may seek it only in a human being. Only a human being and his center can stimulate and awaken that of another.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

Art is the great stimulus to life.

But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.

I don't get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good - Bach, Beethoven - yes, good.

Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it's also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you're trying to work on something and it's not going anywhere, you can go to school and there's a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.