Raf Simons Quotes

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.

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 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.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

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

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness.

To me, it's like the difference between a pen and a paintbrush. Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from. Nobody really does. It sort of arrives when it wants to.

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.

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.

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!'

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.

You can't rush inspiration.

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

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

It's sort of a mystery where ideas come from.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Over the years I have discovered that ideas come through an intense desire for them; continually desiring, the mind becomes a watchtower on the lookout for incidents that may excite the imagination.

When you start to engage with your creative processes, it shakes up all your impulses, and they all kind of inform one another.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.