Rei Kawakubo Quotes

Look around at day-to-day life for ideas, and it finds its way into your work.

But my favorite work is always my next piece.

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.

Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.

Often in each collection, there are three or so seeds of things that come together accidentally to form what appears to everyone else as a final product, but for me, it is never ending.

I think the idea of embracing the process, creating something, no matter how thin it is, that you can call a starting point - whether it's a word or it's an idea, or it's a little piece of narrative that you might base a film on - starting that journey of making the work. That's also something that every individual does very differently.

My own movement of thought is not meant to be a straight point-to-point, linear line of march, but horizontal exploration from one area of interest to another. There is no ultimate destination - no finish line to cross, no final conclusion to be reached. It's the way I feel about dancing - you move around a lot, not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere in time.

Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.

The first thing we do is sit around a table and discuss what we could pick up from daily life, from space. That's how it starts, completely abstract. There's no kind of, "Oh, let's do Peru," or "Let's do pleats," you know?

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

I can't say any artist inspired me, because I'm inspired by the things that go on around me.

Try drawing or painting a scene you're working on. Often this will help free up you imagination.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.

Yes, I am one of those people who feels that most of my work is adaptation of one sort or another. For me, it's a way to jump-start the engine. For example, some people use the technique of basing a character on a friend. They start writing with his or her voice, then at a certain point, the character takes off on his or her own. It probably no longer resembles the model, but it helped the author to get going. I find that's true of form, too. For every play I've written, I know what play I was trying to imitate. That helps me get going.

I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.

Fashion keeps me designing: the love of change, the idea that the next one will be the right one, the nonstop dialogue

I get inspiration, a lot of times, from very commonplace things that just strike a chord and develop themselves in the subconscious.

Let an idea swim to the surface like a fish in a pool...let the mind drift to the vision.

The joy is in creating, not maintaining.

I try when I'm writing to fill my head and my ears with all sorts of stuff and then let it settle and filter through. At a certain point it seems like fruitless activity because you're taking a lot of time and not seeming to get anything. And then, slowly, you realize you've actually digested elements and that your thinking is being freed up and the way you build up compositions is changed as a result of what you've been listening to.

When you're shopping, too, you feel like you're designing as you're shopping. You're like, 'I love this, but I wish it was shorter or I wish it was purple. I wish it was a different fabric,' you know. It starts there, but then when you have to start from scratch, it really comes with an idea first, and then... you want to tweak and then you come up with something else and you want to add to it or change. It's fun. It's like an ocean - you can do whatever.

To switch right into creativity usually takes a bit of time, and this came up right at that juncture where I thought, okay, here's an opportunity to work with somebody I really respect in a new medium.