David Sheff Quotes

Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

Disorder brings about order.

When I came into the oil there was chaos. I brought order…. It was done the way it was because that was the way it had to be done.

Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.

Generally, my life is absolute chaos, but when I'm writing songs, it's very thought out and regimented.

I make things complicated for myself and chaotic, so I feel unsettled, and then the challenge is to make something structured and complete emerge from that.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Good order makes men bold, and confusion, cowards.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

Music creates order out of chaos.

Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

Madness, and then illumination.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.

My books and records are arranged according to subject, and within each subject, they're alphabetical by author or artist. The music tapes are alphabetical and the performance tapes are in chronological order.I like to control my environment, because I feel if I have my physical space in order, then I'm free to dream.