Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

Clarity of mind, body and spirit is the key to creativity.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Solitude is creativity's best friend, and solitude is refreshment for our souls.

When I'm writing, I separate from everyone. Even my band. I push myself, and I'm alone with my thoughts. Separating from friends and comforts and family lets you think a lot deeper about subject matter. Working alone drives me a little crazy, but it makes the writing as honest as possible.

Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.

For some, being involved in a scene is a great thing because the social element can drive creativity. For me, though, it's never really been like that. It's the opposite. I've always had this instinct to escape.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

Usually when I draw, I try to be in a contemplative mood. I try to keep my mind as empty, vacant and tranquil as possible. The outer mind is like the surface of the sea. On the surface, the sea is full of waves and surges; it is all restlessness. But when we dive deep below, the same sea is all peace, calmness and quiet, and there we find the source of creativity.

To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.

Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.

I think loneliness comes with being creative, because you are obsessed with creation. And it is so satisfying that sometimes, I have noticed, I completely neglect my friends and my family, and they fall away.

The powers of the mind should be concentrated and the mind turned back upon itself; as the darkest places reveal their secrets before the penetrating rays of the sun, so will the concentrated mind penetrate its own innermost secrets.

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

Nothing will change the fact that I cannot produce the least thing without absolute solitude.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.

To have the ability to withdraw into oneself and forget everything around one when one is creating - What, I think is the only requirement for being able to bring forth something beautiful. The whole thing is - a mystery.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson