Helmut Jahn Quotes

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

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

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

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

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

I like to have books around to give me ideas-to get the verbal part of my brain to start working.

Write down everything you can think of, no matter how stupid it seems. I always write down my thoughts throughout the day. Sometimes good things come out of it, and I'll find an idea to develop into a song, so my best advice is to try and draw inspiration from everyday things.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.

A new idea is like carbonated liquid in a bottle. You just sort of shake it until the cork pops, then you write and write.

You can't rush inspiration.

That's the buzz for me, the creative process. An idea is never as good as when it's in your head. And then it's just how little you ruin it.

I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.

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.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

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

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

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.

People seem to think that they can't come up with ideas, and they're wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. Kids get told not to make things up, and in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn't stick.