Stephen King Quotes

I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

I love improvising.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

I leave a lot open so I can fill it in later. If I don't have any ideas right away, I can fill it in later.

I think all my films have a different journey. Therefore, I take it as it comes.

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 think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

When recording, whatever you first think about, you come out with something totally different at the end of it. Whatever plans you have you throw away, because it's always going to end up sounding pretty different from what you initially thought of. I probably only had about five or six songs when I started, and it just sort of flowed from that.

My ideas are not developed before I actually do the pieces.

I have an idea of a set of colors and see what I have. A lot of things, the best, more magical things in the paintings just sort of happen. They aren't things I thought of in advance. They are more things I am given. What paint does, in watercolor more than oil but it happens in oil too, are things one never expects if you work freely. I suppose I learned a lot coming to this after years of playing improvisational music. I have to trust my intuition and I work in the moment, when that moment seems to be happening. And to leave it alone when it is not.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

If you confine it, you're confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous, so that anything can happen, like we don't want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

A good director's not sure when he gets on the set what he's going to do.

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.

I just throw it out and see what happens. If it sounds and feels right, then I continue.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

You must plan to be spontaneous.

I hate it, it is tedious... when I write for my act, it is very improvisational, I write bullet points, I cannot sit in front of a computer; that is not my style.

I started doing radio pieces with no clear, preconceived idea, except that I have a tendency to be theatrical.