Anthony Burgess Quotes

Ideas come through us, not from us.

I think creativity is spiritual. I absolutely believe that.

I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.

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

I think God gave me an inner dictionary. If you play the right music that my heart loves, lyrics just come right to me.

I don't think I”m a very good actor. Everything is very tentative and at a certain point you click in and just feel the spirit move you. I can be possessed really well.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.

I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.

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

Hopefully people can see my music is tethered to my brain.

Sometimes I was so busy being tuned in to outside ideas, expectations, and demands, I failed to hear the unique music in my soul. I forfeited my ability to listen creatively to my deepest self, to my own God within.

You know, there's always someone in mind when I'm writing. You know, it's all comes from somewhere inside.

I think you'll always be able to do what your ear tells you.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

People have talents that are different. Where does the creative flow come from - inside us or from a higher power? I don't ask any questions. I just write it down.

You know yourself; you gotta know your seasons. There be certain seasons, it's telepathy.

I'd listen to a song and say, 'Hang on, I like that piano thing,' so I'd play the guitar like that and get the vibe from it, and it just evolved from the get-go. It was pretty obvious what to do; You don't think about rock n' roll: you just do it.

I believe in intuition and inspiration...at times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.

Acting isn't something that I think about very consciously, somehow that just doesn't work for me. I just kind of feel my way into it.

Follow your heart. It rarely leads you astray. It's thinking that gets us into trouble.

Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.

There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don't know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It's only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.

Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.