Maya Lin Quotes

We don't design by calculator or by demographics or anything like that. We really are a group of creative, sensitive people. We have our charmed little world where we get to make things. We're really lucky.

Creativity runs on automatic, no matter what's happening in other parts of my life. I can't help myself. It's been in me, and it evolves in me over the years. It's a condition in me.

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.

No art comes from the conscious mind.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

I don't control my writing - it controls me.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

About half my designs are controlled fantasy, 15 percent are total madness and the rest are bread-and-butter designs.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

I really like writing poetry and lyrics because it's one thing where I give up control. I don't feel like I need to be in control of it. I just sort of let it happen, and then I know when it's done. I know when it's finished.

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

I never control a film. The film controls me.

I enjoy being creative.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.