Ray Bradbury Quotes

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

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

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

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.

I write and draw from the gut. I often don't know what my stories are about until they're done.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

When I write a poem, I go into a state of self-forgetfulness, and something higher takes over; I like to call it my best self.

Sometimes, I knew generally what I was going to do, but I've never written anything down. Call it a sixth sense: the lines just come.

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in,-when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

As soon as your mind knows that it's on and it's supposed to produce some lines, either it doesn't or it produces things that are very predictable. And that's why I say I'm not interested in writing something that I thought about. I'm interested in discovering where my mind wants to go, or what object it wants to pick up.

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious...that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.

To me, the question of inspiration is an exercise in hindsight. The truth is, inspiration is mysterious at the time. I don't think it's ever a rational process.

I don't consciously go out looking for themes. They attach themselves to me.

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 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.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

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.