Creative Awakening Quotes

It's a thrill to see the birth of an artist.

Everything that's created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.

I never knew I was an artist until I did 'Last of the Mohicans'.

I got a part in a play in 10th grade, and that changed everything, woke up my love of theater.

At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

My mind starts to work creatively past 10 P.M. or 11 P.M. - all of a sudden there's silence and my head starts going.

At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

Listening to 'Raising Sand' was one of those turning points in my life that really made something click in my brain.

I was having a really-early-onset midlife crisis, and then something clicked in an improv class, and I knew.

I think there is a period of esthetic discovery that happens to a man and he can do all sorts of things at white heat.

It is said an artist spends their whole life trying to get to the place where their heart was first opened up. 'Rent' was that place for me.

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.

The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It's more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.

Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.

That little window like 2004 through like 2010 was probably the most, like most inspiring time of my creative life, for sure.

I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them.

I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn't really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.

Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

Literature may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.

When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.