George Saunders Quotes

I don't really dissect too much when ideas come - they just kind of pop into my head; I just take them and run.

Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.

Life's so much based on instincts and quick decisions, and people don't know what they're looking for.

I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical, what you're doing probably ends up being too specific.

I go by instinct - I don't worry about experience.

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

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

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.

The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on.

I never make conscious decisions.

I don't really think, I just walk.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

I never think about the play or visualize anything. I do what comes to me at that moment. Instinct. It has always been that way.

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

Painting is almost like a sport. It's like this action thing. When I do it, I'm really not thinking. The paintings are like a diary that I might not want to read again.

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

It just comes out of my subconscious. If you asked me to draw you a doodle, I couldn't do it.

Sometimes, I knew generally what I was going to do, but I've never written anything down. Call it a sixth sense: the lines just come.

Sometimes with Polaroids, the shot you want to get in your head doesn't happen. What it makes me do is be patient, I guess, or let go of that presumption of what the shot's going to be.

I don't have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.