Creative Instinct Quotes

I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

If I don't feel it when I'm sitting there, if it doesn't give me the feeling I got when I heard 'Pony' or 'So Anxious' or 'In Those Jeans,' I scrap it.

I don't use my brain about the creative thing. From a business standpoint, I instinctively do things: when I get something right, it's never because I use my brain.

We are born to create, and we can't help it. Why is that? Because God, the great Creator, is in us.

I think it's very rare, as an actor, that you get to a script, or an idea of a script, and you go, "Oh, I just have to do that!" It fell into place very quickly.

When I'm sitting in the studio, a mix isn't done till I feel it in my gut.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

I never control a film. The film controls me.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint - he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can't learn what's right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.

Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.

People say, 'Well, whose career do you follow? Where do you see your career going? What movie do you want to do next?' And I can't tell you what type of movie I would go and do next. I would have to read the script and feel for a character. And if I feel in my gut for a character, I know that that's somebody I have to play.

There's always hunger to create because I believe that's what I do. I believe that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

I didnt go to film school, i went to films

There are people who are genetically made to start record labels, and I'm not one of those people. People just have it in their blood and are good at it. Corey Rusk from Touch and Go and Ian MacKaye. These are people who have made their own labels.

I don't compose, actually. I just record. I'm the opposite of a composer in my way of working. I'm more instinctive.

I think, what happened with 'Dead Silence' is that other people told us that we should be doing that and now that I look back, I realize, 'should' is not a word that comes into an art. It's whatever you're feeling like doing.

I've come to appreciate how special a song is compared to other art forms, because you can carry it around in your head and your heart, and it remains part of you. It just comes as natural as a bird to me, always did. It's the way singer-songwriters make sense of our lives.

I jump into the process, and the record begins to gel at some point. Then I begin to get a picture of where I'm going. But it's not always something I know on the front-end.

When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.

I've always been creating my whole life, you know. I've just had a need to create, whether it was sculpting or writing or directing. It's just ever since I was a kid, I don't know.

The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.