Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

My creative life is a constant struggle to achieve a balance between letting things flow in and letting things flow out.

A lot of artists need structure.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

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.

It's funny, because you want to make it different, but when I start building a character I do the same thing with each of them, which is start with a blank canvas. It's like painting a picture.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy — or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others. To develop ‘Hidden Art’ will also, of course, take time and energy – and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

It just takes a long time for me [to write a song]. I'm very slow. And it comes, kind of, by dribbles and drops.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

As much as I love performing, nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period. Songs, ideas, even paintings are pouring out of me. My inspiration and usual subject matter: life.

I love creating. I am addicted to the drug of creation and creating things. I get a little depressed when I am struggling to find what I know is locked inside. If it's a lyric or something that is challenging me, I can be very depressed, but when it's like heaven opens up and it gives you a song, it's amazing. There's nothing else that I enjoy more probably.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.