Gillian Armstrong Quotes

I don't pick subjects as much as they pick me.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

I'm not much given to making shamanistic remarks about all this, but I'm a great believer in the dream life. If I can carry without spilling whatever it is that drips into my head in the night to my desk, then that's valuable.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

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.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

I don't really go through a process, it goes through me.

Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'.

Sometimes I feel as if sections of my ballets were done for me - that I didn't do them myself.

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.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

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

Inspiration doesn't really work like that - you're not looking out for it. Inspiration is something that tends to capture you rather than you capture it.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.