Sue Grafton Quotes

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

I get lost in my right brain, especially in creative things.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

Ideas are all around you - everything gives you ideas. But the real source is the part of your brain that dreams.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Communication is very important. And the arts do that, whether it's film or theater.

I write in the studio.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

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

What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?