Albert Hammond Jr. Quotes

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!'

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

Despite a few really bad days we had quite a lot of fun making Low, especially when all the radical ideas were making sense and things were starting to click.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

Inspiration is some mysterious blessing which happens when the wheels are turning smoothly.

Typically my ideas come to me in the most inane ways possible. I had the initial idea for 'Quantum Conundrum' while I was walking down the street to get breakfast. People are like, 'Whoa, what's your inspiration, is it something amazing?' No, I was just really hungry.

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

You can't rush inspiration.

Sometimes the best ideas will come in the least inspiring places.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

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.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Ideas sometimes come from nowhere, and sometimes they take lots of thinking.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.

Sometimes ideas feel like they were already there, and that you're just discovering them.

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.

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.