Steve Erickson Quotes

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.

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.

I get inspired at different times and in different ways.

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

All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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.

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

My creativity all comes from the same place. I wear one very comfortable, large hat.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

Music breeds its own inspiration. You can only do it by doing it. You may not feel like it, but you push yourself. It's a work process. Or just improvise. Something will come.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er, Scatters from her pictured urn Thoughts that breathe and words that burn.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

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.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.