Robert Musil Quotes

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission.

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

[Mannerism is when] you think you have all these great ideas, and none of them are good at the end of the day. But while you are pursuing those other things subconsciously happen.

It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.... Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconsciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with a blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what happened as if in a revelation.

The animals are at a level prior to thinking. They haven't lost themselves in thought. We rise above thinking and then we meet them again, where we're both in no-thought. There's a deep connection.

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

The fact of the matter is, if you have to have a process, I think, to figure out how to make everything work together, you just don't get that. But maybe there's a way to do it.

Acting is really instinctual and I think you can overanalyse what you're doing. A lot of it has to be based on instinct.

The main thing you worry about is just coming up with songs at all. I don't sit down and write stuff like certain writers do. They think about what they are going to write first and then they write it. I just get what comes in at me. It's like I'm a musician and if I can keep my mitt on, I can catch the balls that come at me.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

I'm a writer, not an editor, and though the editing rarely cut into my writing time, it did take away from that walking-around-thinking-about-it-when-you're-not-thinking-about-it time that I think is important for writers. When you're half-thinking about what you're working on while driving, cooking . . . just letting things sift and settle, come to you.

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

To think is not always to see.

If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.

I don't think about making sexy clothes. It's just my instinct to make them.