Johannes Brahms Quotes

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just direction traffic.

The visionary imagination is the source of art and religion.

I would find myself, not necessarily always assigning these little bits of music for here or there, but all of a sudden something would fall into place and it would be exactly that.

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

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.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

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.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

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!'

I just get an idea and then all of a sudden I've got a song.

Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

That's the beauty of creativity. It comes from the ether. I like to think, sometimes, it's like I haven't written it, it's more like I just reached up and grabbed it from somewhere. That song, 'Song of the Red Rock Mountain,' is one of them. I recorded it and thought, 'Where did that come from?'

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.