Creative Stimuli Quotes

My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.

Spring and fall, those are very inspiring times of the year for me.

The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

I get inspiration, a lot of times, from very commonplace things that just strike a chord and develop themselves in the subconscious.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

Fashion is not interesting unless it has some connection to something outside of that world. It's the same thing with any part of the arts: you can't just take pictures - you have to look at science, to listen to music; you have to be aware of the connections within the world. If you take something in an isolated box, it loses all significance.

Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect.

When I'm writing, those ideas are seldom inspired by music itself. I won't often listen to an artist and come up with an idea.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

Relationships are hard regardless! But I think they feed the artist: relationships, children, life, family - it all feeds the artist. Loss. Joy. Sacrifice.

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.