Ze Frank Quotes

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

For one person, organized files might be a crucial tool for creativity; another person finds inspiration in random juxtapositions.

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.

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

I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively. We submit to things as we're going on our own journey.

One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.

There's no such thing as writer's block. I'm brilliant all the time every day. It never stops.

Sometimes, if I allow time to be creative, it doesn't show up.

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process.

I'm a believer that you shouldn't really talk about the drawing until you're done with the drawing.

I really believe that cultivating creativity, as a general principle, is about managing your energy.

I think when you're being creative, you still attach it to reality somehow.

I always imagine, and try to be on the lookout, for new things, for references that can inspire me creatively so I can showcase things that people haven't done before or that are new.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

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

There is something about the creative process... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened... it's a sort of happy accident.

When you start to engage with your creative processes, it shakes up all your impulses, and they all kind of inform one another.

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!

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 always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.