Loren Eiseley Quotes

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

The creative process requires chaos before form emerges.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

The most emotional part is when I go into my studio every day and pretty much never have an idea of what's gonna happen.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

When I'm asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved. It is work. But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical. The work prepares you for that moment. Suddenly the clouds roll in and the soft light you longed for appears.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

The creative universe begins with its essentiality, and, whatever path the imagination takes, ends with its purity.

There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

As an actor, you want to be open to the unexpected. So in order to be open to that, you do have to get out of your discursive mind just like in any creative process, this isn't just about acting. So you have to learn a little bit how to work with your own mind.

If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.

I've always had a really great time being in movies and writing music when I get home. The more creative I am, the more it feeds into other creative aspects of my life.

I was always the type of person, and still am the type of person, that I cannot be creative and use substances. So from a very early age I knew that if I wanted to make music, successfully, in any capacity, I was going to have to get sober.

I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

Songwriting is a mystery. And it's a mystery to me that it's a mystery. But that sounds stupid.

I Still Approach A Scene As One Would Approach A Guitar Solo. You Don't Exactly Know How You're Going To Phrase This Or That. Which I Think Is Beautiful. That Idea Of Chance.

You hope that the ideas will come together. You just don't know. That's part of what I suppose is part of being brave and putting creative work out there.

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.