Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

To me, it's like the difference between a pen and a paintbrush. Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from. Nobody really does. It sort of arrives when it wants to.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

They ... asked me: 'How do you make your pictures?' I was puzzled ... I said, I don't know, it's not important.

I don't think there's really any difference between art - or writing, or music - and magic. And I particularly draw the link between magic and writing. I think that they are profoundly connected.

Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

When you're writing a 25-minute episode that can be anything, sometimes you just start with a character, and you let them walk into the room. Then you let your instinct guide you. That's how we made art when we were 15 years old. And that's so fun to us.

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious...that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

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.

Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from.

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.

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

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!'

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.