Jello Biafra Quotes

I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry.

I always worried that the creative well would dry up. I was sure that if I wrote a book a year, I would eventually run out of ideas. Actually, the opposite has been true for me. The more I write, the more ideas come to me and it gets easier.

Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.

Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

I keep very weird hours. I never know when I'm going to get an idea.

I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.

I've gone seventy-nine hours without sleep, creating. When that flow is going, it's almost like a high. You don't want it to stop. You don't want to go to sleep for fear of missing something.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

The ultimate point of a piece for me is that it drives the next one. Does it open new doors? That's the success of a piece.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life: to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by.

For one person, organized files might be a crucial tool for creativity; another person finds inspiration in random juxtapositions.

I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.

I don't write a great song every day. I don't write a great song every couple weeks. It comes in such random times.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper. And the paper is talking before you do.

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic.