Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

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

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.

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

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'

I write all the time. I always have. I can pick up my horn to warm up, and an idea will pop into my head, and I'll write it down and file it away for another time.

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you're starting to see things being made flesh, and you're able to respond to that flesh, that's really exciting.

Not all ideas are like a twinkling star in the sky, and you get inspired to make a record the next day.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

I think every writer's had the experience of having a really good idea, waiting to write it, and then once you write it, you're like, "Oh I kind of got past the sell by date on this." I'm not connected to the initial spark that was the idea. A lot of that's about staying open.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique. The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know - apart from the more obvious sensual ones - is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols. Making an idea into an emotion.

I don't freestyle, but when I'm writing and thinking, sometimes things pop up - that's basically a freestyle.

I wake up sometimes with an idea and then I write it down. It's not necessarily easy, but when you focus on something it comes.

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas.

When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.

When I get an idea for a song it would gel in my mind for weeks or months, and then one day just like that, Ill write it.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

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!

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.