Lynn Coady Quotes

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.

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.

You can't slot a time and a space and think 'ok now it's time to sit and compose.' It just doesn't work like that for me.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

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.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

Composing is sort of an intuitive act. You have to put yourself in the right frame of mind.

I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively. We submit to things as we're going on our own journey.

You can't rush inspiration.

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

The unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

When something comes to my brain, I don't ignore it. You never know what it's going to turn into.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

To me, it's like the difference between a pen and a paintbrush. Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from. Nobody really does. It sort of arrives when it wants to.

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

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.