Italo Calvino Quotes

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

I get so much energy and I learn so much through collaborating with other people. Ultimately, I think the best music will always be created through collaborations - pooling together skills to create something bigger than any individual. I like to use my own SOPHIE material to present ideas in their most extreme, un-compromised form. I really use those opportunities to express exactly where I'm at in terms of production and writing ideas, as a document of my thoughts and feelings, as well.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

One of the reasons I love making movies is because it's an opportunity to share with the world a different way of being or a different way of living or seeing the world. If it's something you've already seen before, if I have too many reference points for it, then it's not exciting for me to make.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

I've worked with people who wanted to be creative every day: it was like a goal to arrive with something very special. Sometimes it's just disturbing, because special is good when it's needed. But when it's not needed, it's confusing, and you go away from the authenticity by a strong desire to be unique and singular.

Being a creative person, I want to feel the highs and the lows.

Creativity is not about making 30 songs in 30 days. It's never about demand and supply. No one can possibly do that.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.