Margaret Sackville Quotes

My work always comes from the same source - from movement. It doesn't necessarily come from an outside idea, though the source can be something small or large that I've seen, often birds or other animals. The seeing can then provoke the imagining.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I don't think of work between albums. Of course, I go through regular life and I live and I experience different things, good and bad, and it does help me, but I don't think about writing or what I'm gonna do with whatever's going on while I'm going through it.

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

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.

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.

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.

I'm doing what all modern artists do now, which is nothing - just sit around and dream about things. I'll do what they call 'the stroke of genius.'

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.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

I like to stay in the space of creativity, and I want to go towards that all the time.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

But how shall I get ideas? ''Keep your wits open! Observe! Observe! Study! Study! But above all, Think! Think! And when a noble image is indelibly impressed upon the mind - Act!

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

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

How does a person create a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and to be in touch with the miraculous.

Ideas come from everywhere - they come from what you see and hear and imagine.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Apparently one impression we are making... is that creativeness consists of lightning striking you on the head in one great glorious moment.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.