Alphonse de Lamartine Quotes

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

You can't rush inspiration.

When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.

Creativity is a scavenger hunt. It's your obligation to pay attention to clues, to the thing that gives you that little tweak.

Proximity to the crowd, to the majority view, spells the death of creativity. For a soul can create only when alone, and some are chosen for the flowering that takes place in the dark avenues of night.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.

Nothing really came, everything was like inspired by something.

What I wanted to hear didn't exist, so it was necessary for me to go out and create it.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

That is a big danger, losing your inspiration. When I work in film and television I try to do each take a little differently. I never want to do the same thing twice, because then you're not being spontaneous, you're just recreating something.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

I never look at other people's work. My mind has to be completely focused on my own illusions.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

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!'

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

Sometimes ideas feel like they were already there, and that you're just discovering them.

Creativity is down the tube. And people give a lot of lip service to individuality. I know they all appreciate it, but they all say they would like to do it, but they don't want to work at it, and it doesn't come out of the sky.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.