Odilon Redon Quotes

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.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.

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.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

I've never sat down and tried to write something for some occasion. You just write the tune and stay totally wide open to everything. It'll find the person or persons who are supposed to do it.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.

I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.

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

I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively. We submit to things as we're going on our own journey.

My best songs come from a place outside myself.

The music, for me, doesn't come on a schedule. I don't know when it's going to come, and when it does, I want it out.

I've written some really good songs that I love hungover because I wasn't overthinking it.

When I wrote 'Grand Illusion,' I was making it up as we went along. I wrote this stuff and tried to do the best job I could.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.