Stewart Brand Quotes

I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.

Sometimes I go outside after a long stretch of writing and I'm surprised it's not raining. Or that it's daylight. Or that it's not the middle of winter. I don't know if that level of immersion is normal, but it's now I do things. I like it. It works well for me.

A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 o'clock, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night.

I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There's something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me.

I go to bed late. My mind starts going at night - that's when those creative juices begin flowing.

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

Awakening your spiritual side is really what artists do. When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

I think there's an inevitable fact that I somehow absorb part of what I'm doing, because that's what you're constantly thinking about, and that's what's in your veins, and that's what you get up at 4:30 in the morning for and fall into bed after.

My mind starts to work creatively past 10 P.M. or 11 P.M. - all of a sudden there's silence and my head starts going.

When I make a good beat, I'm possessed. I'm not on earth!

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

Sometimes a song can be born in few minutes, if the feeling is right, some other times it can take days.

When you open your mind up, and you go into a creative state, you can't just switch if off. When you have an idea, a creative impulse, and then you ignore it, it can keep you up when you just want to go to your bed - which is why it's great to have voice recorders on your phone!

I don't really start writing until later in the night. I'm a night owl.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

When you are in the field of creativity, you lose track of time. Only the flow exists.

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

...I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except when I'm making love. Two things when you forget time, when nothing exists except the moment--the moment of writing, the moment of love. That perfect concentration is bliss.

I never write in the daytime. It's like running through the shopping mall with your clothes off. Everybody can see you. At night ... that's when you pull the tricks ... magic.

I tend to write first thing, and then do my drawing later. I like to draw at night. But often I go for long stretches without drawing, because I'm trying to figure out what I'm writing.

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

It is a commonplace among artists and children at play that they're not aware of time or solitude while they're chasing their vision. The hours fly. The sculptress and the tree-climbing tyke both look up blinking when Mom calls, 'Suppertime!'