Creativity Process Quotes

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.

Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.

For us, creativity means thinking about the lives of our audience and how to connect with them.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

Invent. I love inventing, that's my first passion.

Art is rearranging and grouping mistakes.

I am trying to write stuff that is different. I am a big science fan. I read a lot of science, and 'Wonderland' has a lot of science in it. I don't know. They are hard to describe... We are living in a wonderland age of science.

Reminding myself that listening is just as important a creative act as thinking is key for me.

Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

People're artists they're doing something, taking a hunk of chaps, giving it some order, some form, and presenting it saying here is my little song and dance, my chaos.

There's this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you're over-thinking the songwriting process. There's no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that's going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

The Beastie Boys are guys I loved before I met them, and when I got to know them, we started a magazine together, and we started making videos together, and a lot of it came out of us just cracking ourselves up, like going to the fake mustache store and buying fake mustaches.

I don't remember being afraid of anything in making films.

Give your mind as long as possible to come up with something original.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

I like making art.

I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.

You cannot teach a person how to write songs. It's about being your own person and following your instincts.

I have a folder in my office with about 400 ideas in it. So it will take me another 40 years to get through those.

I like to experiment a lot and invent things.

As for the outside world, the artist is confronted by what he sees; but what he sees is primarily what he looks at.

Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way.