Friedrich Schiller Quotes

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.

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!'

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.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

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.

The more you reason the less you create.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

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.

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.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Reason is mechanical, wit chemical, and genius organic spirit.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

My inspiration is endless; I can't define it. It is a constant flow and evolution. In general, I'm taking it from everywhere. People get nervous when they walk with me, as I'll see something and suddenly have to text it to myself.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.

Sometimes I think your intellect can get in your way as an actor or an artist. When you come from a world of improv and comedy, you're able to let it flicker and fall out.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

You can't rush inspiration.

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did it.