Van Morrison Quotes

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission.

I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.

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.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

A lot of storytelling... you're a bit hypnotized by it, and things just come out in certain ways, and you look at it and try to gather it.

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.

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration.'

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

Sometimes you feel like you have to do research to make something, other times you know you don't feel it so much.

I called the guys from Promise of the Real, whom I've been playing with, and they were all on the road. Right after I hung up the phone, I wrote another song and started writing another, and I'm going, "Hey, I can't wait. I should be doing this now!" My experience tells me that when it's there, it's there, and you can't make it wait. So I got Jimmy Keltner and Paul Bushnell, two good guys, and went in and did this record ["Peace Trail"].

Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

I've found that there isn't any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles' songs probably originated in about five minutes.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed to sleep. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them...

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

I love creating. I am addicted to the drug of creation and creating things. I get a little depressed when I am struggling to find what I know is locked inside. If it's a lyric or something that is challenging me, I can be very depressed, but when it's like heaven opens up and it gives you a song, it's amazing. There's nothing else that I enjoy more probably.