Organic Creation Quotes

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

You can't force music; It just has to come to you.

I've never had to search for themes. My films just come naturally out of my interest.

The dripping... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it's a natural part in the evolution of the work.

To work from nature is to improvise.

Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."

Me making music happened not even from a desire to make records.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

I've never conceptualized much of what I write about. Maybe, once I'm onto something, I'll conceptualize a finished record. I want the songs to tie together and make sense together. I'm not like, "Oh, I want to explore this idea." That's just not how the creative process works for me. It's more like something strikes me, or finds me, and then I wrestle with it after that. I don't sit back in my armchair, like, "What kind of philosophy can I explore today?"

I don't work from nature, I work like nature.

Thus it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life could easily be produced from inanimate material.

When I was doing it, I just thought, 'I'm going to do this because it's fun.' I wasn't writing for a publisher or a publishing model; I didn't really think about it, but then, somehow, it worked out in my favor.

In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.

My work is on the one hand laboured, and on the other completely happenstance and intuitive. But that's the swish in the work, I think. It's really important to me that the work isn't just sitting on top of something, that the materials are woven together - that they are recognisable and from the world.

When I get into the studio, it's not about trying to get a good song, it's about whatever comes naturally.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

I don't really go through a process, it goes through me.

I don't have an idea for a play until after I've finished writing it. I write first, and come up with what it's about later. My technique could be compared to having a large canvas and coming in every day and putting a dot on it somewhere, and after several years - literally - I begin to say, That reminds me of an elephant, so I think I'll make it one.

You know, we never really know what we're going to write next. Which is part of the excitement when we go in and do a new album. No battle plan, we just go in and do it and what comes out, comes out.

I don't like to try to put, like, 'Let's do this type of record,' 'cause it never turns out that way anyways.

What people don't understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that's what everyone gets wrong. You can't consciously create something that's important, it's a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything.

The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground.