Thomas E. Mann Quotes

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I think the way kids create is so inspiring. They're drawing a picture? They love the picture they drew; they're not tortured about it.

I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.

It's fun being creative and that's satisfying.

I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind while doing something unrelated. You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

Art is not only about angst.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

The first song I wrote was called 'You,' and it was a love song about somebody who didn't even exist.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.