Christopher Alexander Quotes

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

I get lost in my right brain, especially in creative things.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

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

I do enjoy the form of things. I enjoy finding the form that seems best to fit what I'm thinking about. I don't set out to find a bizarre way of writing.

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

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

As an architect, I learned to think and express myself on flat forms, on paper, and to imagine the contour of the lines of a design.

I'm just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that's my way of thinking.

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

Whatever man does he must do first in his mind.

Sometimes when I'm really enjoying a book, I'll read a sentence or paragraph and just think - how can someone's head be wired in such a way that they'd come up with that?

A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Something like 'Abstract' can really give people access to the behind-the-scenes of how our physical surroundings take shape.

I start with an idea in my head. I sketch it out quickly as a line drawing, using pencil. It never comes out quite right - usually a bit better than my mental picture.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

The way I build stuff in my mind, it's sort of like a puzzle for me. I always talk about it like, when I'm writing a scene there's a certain feeling I'm trying to create. I'll have my list of scenes and it's more like feelings, these notes I want to hit.

Just taking a piece of dirt and envisioning the building you'd like to put on it - it's an amazing process.

I'm always seeing stuff and imagining scenes in my head when I'm making music.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.