St. Lucia Quotes

Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

As much as I love performing, nothing juices me up creatively like being in my own studio for an extended period. Songs, ideas, even paintings are pouring out of me. My inspiration and usual subject matter: life.

I usually have an idea that I want to build on and let the music take me where I wanna go.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

Nothing stops the forward march of any creative endeavor like the need to do it absolutely perfectly. And who is to judge what is 'perfect' anyway? What I have judged full of flaws so many others have called terrific. Maybe the definition of Perfection is something that actually gets done.

In terms of creative engagement, I just love being able to produce, produce, produce. You don't always get it perfect, but it has much more of an improvisational element, and you learn.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

My creative life is a constant struggle to achieve a balance between letting things flow in and letting things flow out.

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.

I would rather have ideas and some difficulties of technique than a perfect technique and no ideas.

I don't believe in writer's block. There are good days when you're writing and less good days. I've learned that if it's not happening to walk away and return later. I doodle a lot and often get my best ideas with a pencil in my hand while I'm doodling. The problem is, sometimes I lose my doodles and that's bad!

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

I have no idea where my career is going. I just make the best music that I possibly can.

I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

At 10 o'clock in the morning I'd go right in the studio. It feels good to be there in the morning before the day starts to mess with you - I don't mean in a negative way, but before I'd speak to a lot of people or get into anything, I'd go in there and just see what I felt. A lot happens in the morning for me in the studio.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

I like making movies. I like the process. I like trying out new ideas, and if they don't work, they don't work. That's the reason I generated the money in the first place, to be able to try things. That's where I spend my money.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.