Creative Timing Quotes

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

It doesn't necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

I think anyone can do a book if they want to, it's just timing- wise.

I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

It's hard to regulate the speed at which you can achieve something creative and emotional.

I'd like to do a film in Canada, but it's too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there's too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.

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 love when rappers have a off-beat, very abstract timing, and he certainly did.And any rapper who really approaches rapping with the art form of songwriting melodically - I know a bunch of rappers who actually go in before they write the lyrics and come up with the melody. And you can hear and feel that difference so much when that's the case.

There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.

And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.

In the early '90s when the American independent movie started, it held personal vision as a premium. That was brilliant timing.

In general, in painting sometimes people like Picasso or somebody are not very well known in the beginning, sometimes they become well known just before they die, or sometimes after they have died. I think these people start to be artists after they've stopped existing.

I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.

To kill the misconception, I don’t think the songs we wrote before ‘Danger Days’ are bad songs by any means. In fact, I kinda think some of them are among my favorites we have ever written. A lot of them are kinda f—ing rad… they just so happened to have been created in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and we as their parents were not ready to raise them just yet… and so they sat and waited.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

'Unforgiven' is probably an example of a script that I liked right away but thought, 'This is great, but I'd like to do this when I'm older.' So I stuck it in the drawer for ten years and then took it out.

Of all my movies, I feel that 'Krishna Gopalakrishna' remains one of my best works though it could not be called a box office success. I maintain that it was far ahead of its time.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.

I came into my own, you might say, in terms of putting out my first record quite late in life. And yet there's some authors and photographers and even probably recording artists that didn't really hit their stride until their mid-50s.

I'm 23, and if I wanted to release a record when I was 17, I could have released a record, but I'm really glad I didn't.

For a movie - any movie - to work, all the bread has to fall jelly side up; everything has to go right. You have to hit the zeitgeist.

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.

I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.