Alfred Schnittke Quotes

There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind.

As a creative person you just get an idea in your head, and sometimes you just can't shake it off.

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

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.

If I don't have a model in front of me, I don't have an idea.

I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

Whether it's a TV show or a music video, the seed of the idea is what's driving my decisions, not the format or the outcome.

Sometimes something opens up in your brain as I'm writing, thinking about the song, and it's like a whirlwind. It all comes together and I could hear what I wanted the songs to sound like, I just didn't know how to express it.

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

I don't fight creativity. I don't fight against not being creative. If I'm not being creative, I'm not forcing it.

I can't legislate a song into being; it just will not happen for me.

I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.

A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

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

For me, drawing generates thinking and vice versa.

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

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

If you have the ideas, and you're a creative person, then you don't really differentiate in how your ideas manifest themselves.

Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.

You think about the beauty and what you want to transmit. If I think about designing, I can't design.

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.