When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.
When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.
One thing I liked about 'Silver Bell' is that I barely knew how to play in the tuning I was writing in, and I just went for it anyway.
Sia is like no one else I've ever worked with. She comes completely from this non-logical but very emotional place. I could be wrong, but she doesn't really seem to analyse what she's writing. She doesn't really revise it, but goes with that first thing that comes out.
My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don’t expect to go. That’s what happens when you write stories. You listen and you say ‘a ha,’ and you write it down. A lot of it is not planned, not conscious; it happens while you’re doing it. You know more about it after you’re done.
On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.
I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
Rule of art: let half-blind purpose lead you.
They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers.
I've always been able to just concoct a melody quite easily - it's just kind of instinct, really. You've got to channel your subconscious.
I think there's only eight songs on 'Born to Run' - I don't think it's much more than 35 minutes long. But as you move into it, where every song comes up in the sequence makes a lot of sense - though we weren't thinking about it; we were going on instinct at the time.
If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing.
There are no calculations in the records I make. I record as many songs as I can. Songs that I think are my best.
I reached a place where I wanted to make more music, but I didn't know what I wanted. So I stopped labeling music by genre and just got into a studio to be creative. Now I write whatever feels instinctive.
Man may be considered as a superior species of animal that produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.
The way I work on music is that I go into my studio, and I start playing music, and I see what happens, and... I never think about it.
The more you think, the more you ruin things. Art has to come viscerally; otherwise, forget it.
I create by feeling rather than by intellectualizing.
I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.
I wrote 'Zeuglodon' on a whim. I found myself writing the voice of an 11-year-old girl. I don't know why.
I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.
It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.
The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.
