Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed.
What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.
When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.
She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.
I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at.
The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.
I really pull from everyone. I'm absorbent.
Most of us have the residue of thousands of songs in our ears, that if you end up songwriting, I think you're mostly smoking the residue of all that material you absorbed over time.
Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.
Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.
Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.
I went to see 'The Piano' with Holly Hunter when I was in a Paula Vogel play, and I was just gone. I couldn't focus at all. It took that creative part of my brain with it so absolutely.
We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.
Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.
Like most musicians, I'm good at becoming immersed in the music that I am currently working on. We seldom lift up our heads to contemplate even the music we will be doing in the future, let alone what we've done in the past.
I'm one of those people that's listened to so much music, I feel like I've soaked it all and not rejected anything, so it's all present there when I'm in my inventing room.
Though everything else may appear shallow and repulsive, even the smallest task in music is so absorbing, and carries us so far away from town, country, earth, and all worldly things, that it is truly a blessed gift of God.
When you are in the field of creativity, you lose track of time. Only the flow exists.
I do see, in some younger writers, elements and things that I have used - and I am very touched and flattered because I am part of a tapestry that is being absorbed by authors.
What I do is, I'm like a disease that infects real people and I take them over. We can start off in a very journalistic mode describing a character and observing a character - and that's what I do with a lot of characters in my books. And then my imagination eats them alive.
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Every shoot's cool and a new experience, so I try to absorb everything and everyone I can.
When you are not separate from the creative process, time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way - the creative process will take over and you will forget whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work.
