Emma Thompson Quotes

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

I like to stay in the space of creativity, and I want to go towards that all the time.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

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.

Creativity runs on automatic, no matter what's happening in other parts of my life. I can't help myself. It's been in me, and it evolves in me over the years. It's a condition in me.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

Make good art.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.