Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

Research: the distance between an idea and its realization.

Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.

Right now it's only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

Do you know the phrase, 'The word 'water' will not wet you?' It's one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

I like to come up with new ideas and see them grow.

Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.

Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

Briony began to understand the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution.

See all these buildings, Russell? All these buildings were once a drawing on a piece of paper, and before that they were an idea in someone’s head. Any idea that you have, you can make manifest.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.

After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

To make an idea become a reality is a process that fascinates me; otherwise it stays just an idea.

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: Take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

I don't decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I'm not in charge, I'm not in control.

The insight is born with anxiety, guilt and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision.

I don't start with an idea or concept in the sense that I flesh out an idea or concept and set it at the center of something.