Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

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

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

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

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

I'm not much given to making shamanistic remarks about all this, but I'm a great believer in the dream life. If I can carry without spilling whatever it is that drips into my head in the night to my desk, then that's valuable.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

Songwriting is ... all about intuition - this thing pops into your head for a reason and it's up to you to follow it. It's like there's a spirit, or intuitive network, that comes through all of us, but most people don't take the time to think about it or remember it. These little things pop into our heads - it's just a process of intuition. The initial thought comes in a baby state, and you work on that some more.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

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 trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

I work rather blindly. I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don't know where you get the impetus and response to what's before your eyes.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

The key to being a wonderful writer is not to write. You just get out of the way. Leave room for God to walk in the room. And when I write something that I know is right, I get on my knees and say 'thank you.'

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

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

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.