Mike Shinoda Quotes

Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I'm driving or I'm in the shower, you'll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn't have to be much, it doesn't have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won't leave your head and that's when you know you've got something.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I don't know where I got the idea for 'The Great Thumbprint Drawing Book'; I just told my brain to think of a book, and it did.

You can't rush inspiration.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I would say any creative person has that: you can't just force a topic. Whether you're a painter, you want to do a cartoon. Anything. Something may come up that's not your style or suited to what you are working on at the moment. So you file it away and hopefully find a place for it.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell and only then does it review and inspect the multitudes.

The right idea is the one you can't stop thinking about; the one that's in your head first thing in the morning.

I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

I don't start writing a script until I can see it all in my head, then it's a matter of getting it down in white heat.

When you have a creative mind it doesn't stop going.

I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with ideas crying to be documented.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

A lot of people think inspiration means magic. But really, inspiration means to put life into something.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

Imagination is the air of mind.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

For a solo work I need a definite idea. For the present I have none.

For one person, organized files might be a crucial tool for creativity; another person finds inspiration in random juxtapositions.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

I crave ideas, and when an idea hits me, it grips me and it tortures me until I master it.