Creative Inspiration Quotes

I only get involved with projects as a producer if I feel creatively inspired.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

When I begin working on a production, I don't really think about my previous album or albums. I try to have a real creative process.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

When I'm in the studio with a writer, I don't mind for them to take the lead and show me something new.

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.

I think if my father was a truck driver, I would have wanted to share the beauty that was there. He just happens to be Johnny Cash.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

'Black Hole Sun' was written in a car when I was driving home from the studio one night. Pretty much everything that you hear was written in my head.

I pull a lot of the stuff that I play off the rhythm tracks - and Keith Richards has been one of the main contributors to my inspirational playing.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

It's intimidating any time to have a piece of art that someone else created, and that person says, 'Let's see what you created based on what I created.'

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.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

Whenever I write a new song, it always happens when I come back from Europe or Egypt or something like that. It's always from travelling.

In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred.

If my peers had a significant impact on my music, my music would probably be a lot more popular.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle.

I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.

Gershwin inspired me very much. The concept of 'That Lucky Old Sun' was inspired by 'Rhapsody in Blue' - not influenced, but inspired.