Pearl Bailey Quotes

I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.

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

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.

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.

I have always had a mystical attitude toward inspiration. That's my nature.

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.

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

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.

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.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

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.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?

Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.

It's impossible to explain creativity. It's like asking a bird, 'How do you fly?' You just do.

I try to live instinctively. And I guess I've always enjoyed living in a fantasy world, daydreaming.

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

I've come to realise I work so much better when I'm going by instinct.