Creative Cycle Quotes

One of our favorite Joe Strummer quotes was, "No input, no output." Meaning, we're going to hear a band, we're going to go to a museum, or we're going to go hang out with some writer that we admire. We're going to get some input, because if we don't, then we have nothing. It's a circle. It's a respiratory thing.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

At first, I am giving energy to the creation, but later the creation seems to be giving energy to me.

Dream by making and make by dreaming.

Life imitates art and back around.

Well, I always leave massive gaps between albums.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

Every band runs its course.

I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art.

For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.

The period of time between when you're done with a record and when you start touring is the worst period of a time in a musician's life.

Often when I finish a film I'll have that feeling inside me: 'I never want to do this ever again. I don't want to pretend anymore. I want to be myself and do that.' And then, thank God, that feeling goes away after a month or so and I'm raring to go again.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.

The first act is writing, the second act is filming, the third act is releasing. If you have to partake in the third act, it hurts the first act of the next one. It's like a prizefight. You get punched.

All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularlity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose, that change is the only constant.

Anything that is good influences the next thing. It's inevitable. I believe that Hollywood influences the comics, and the comics influence Hollywood - it's a cycle.

I'm really into the recycling of art. That one piece of art inspires another piece of art, which inspires another piece of art. I really like that idea.

We make films because cinemas exhibit it, and they exhibit as we make films.

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

I go back and forth between input phases where I'm reading a lot or trying to get out and explore the world a bit and soak up inspirations and then I'll get back into output mode and write and write and write.

The most reward experience is having another writer come up to you and say that they started writing because they read my books. That is how writing as a profession continues: readers becomes writers who inspire new readers.

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one.