Steve Toltz Quotes

That's the buzz for me, the creative process. An idea is never as good as when it's in your head. And then it's just how little you ruin it.

You just gotta record stuff and move on and make new material. Painters don't wait until they're in some specific gallery before they move on to the next painting.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

[Writing something original from scratch], the initial process is way different. But once it exists and you start to actually work on making it real, then the approach is kind of the same, for me anyways.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

If I get even five per cent of my ideas out and documented before I die, I'll be lucky. I'm not in danger of running out of riffs or ideas anytime soon. They overwhelm me and it's hard to find time to deal with them.

I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

I've already got notebooks full of ideas for new music, so I'm gonna kind of nurture that just like I do all of my ideas and perfect it until it's ready and then I'll just let it go.

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

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

A lot of times, I don't feel responsible for the songs myself. But that's my job or my place in life: to keep my search and catch the ideas before they pass me by.

Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

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.

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

We very much use a prototyping model, play with ideas, and then get stuff started that way, which is how the greatest projects get started.

Any creation of art is conceived and born under influences, amidst the atmosphere of reverie and the most customary volition of the artist. It is there, in any case, that his work arises from.

The 'Station to Station' film has been fascinating to create. It feels as though it made itself in a way, and after awhile, the film told us what it needed and began to sculpt itself.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

The knack is to find your own inspiration and take it on a journey to create work that is personal and revealing.

As I get on and films take four years to complete, I tend to have a hankering for very short projects so you can move on to the next idea. It's the ideas I'm interested in. What comes out of your head.