Ellen McLaughlin Quotes

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.

I never ask myself how I do what I do. After all, how does it rain?

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

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.

Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes.

I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.

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

My goal is to think of nothing when I'm writing a song because too many influences could sabotage a potentially amazing song.

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.

You can't rush inspiration.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

You can catch a scent in the wind - an idea, or a concept - and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can't when you're writing a novel.

My best songs come from a place outside myself.

I did feel that a part of my work was to empty myself out and let it move through me.

Sometimes, it's better to stop thinking and trust your instincts. That's what I used to do when I first started making music, but as time goes on, you can sometimes over-intellectualise things.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness.

You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork. The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both...I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived.

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

When I don't have any ideas, I pick up fabric and start working with it and something happens.

When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about being in the house; you're just there.