Andrew Motion Quotes

I'm also a great believer in the dream life; that while we're asleep, a deep subconscious connection is made about our profoundest fears, hopes, loves, losses, dreads and desires.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

I don't consciously go out looking for themes. They attach themselves to me.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

I dream crazy vivid dreams. Like, entire movies. And sometimes I write songs about 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?

I have a very healthy dream life. I dream a lot many, many, many nights a week. When I'm shooting, it's even more - I don't know if it has to do with stress or with creation.

There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.

The key to being a wonderful writer is not to write. You just get out of the way. Leave room for God to walk in the room. And when I write something that I know is right, I get on my knees and say 'thank you.'

I've always been a great believer that you have to keep producing new things in order to keep life interesting - not only for ourselves, but for the audience as well. That's really always been our principle and way of working.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

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.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. I work with it and rely on it. It's my partner.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

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.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

From time immemorial artistic insights have been revealed to artists in their sleep and in dreams, so that at all times they ardently desired them.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'.

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

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.