Amiri Baraka Quotes

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

For me, the creative process is this giant patchwork of information.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

I'm not a craftsman of graphics or art or film. I'm more of an idea generator and manufacturer.

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

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas.

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.

There are really three parts to the creative process. First there is inspiration, then there is the execution, and finally there is the release.

The profession of being a creative thinker is not so obvious.

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.

I've got research, I have my own life experience I can apply, and I have my imagination.

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.

I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You're working on them, even if you don't know you're working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing.

What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

People seem to have trouble with the imagination. They can't believe that you can just pull things out of your brain like that.

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.