Instant Insight Quotes

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous.

When I was younger, I had conversations with friends about wanting to create something different. Every young musician probably thinks that. But it's difficult to do, because there are only so many words, notes, melodies, songs. But as soon as I stopped thinking and started feeling, it worked. I didn't realize it till I was done.

The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment.

Sometimes I'll come up with a lick that I really love, and I'll try to put the right words to it for years. Suddenly something comes to me that works just right.

Ideas often flash across our minds more complete than we could make them after much labor.

There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

I'm glad I get to do characters. It's just like a Polaroid shot of whoever the person is, and to me, anyway, that's kind of what life is like. You get a general sense of somebody, and then we're all good, we get it. We understand each other.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.

I really admire songwriters or any kind of writer, painter or artist that says, "I'm going to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning and spend this time to this time creating." I do that sometimes, but the songs I like the best come as gifts from somewhere. It's almost like you didn't do anything, like you can't take credit for it because you sat down and the melody and words came out.

One of the great things going on right now is social media and you get a real sense, immediately, about what people are feeling and thinking.

There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

Apparently one impression we are making... is that creativeness consists of lightning striking you on the head in one great glorious moment.

First thought, best thought.

Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich dies zusammen). What a delight this is I cannot tell ! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream.

So, I can't tell you the mentality behind the stuff, because that's thousands of hours manifested into one moment, maybe in the shower or driving down the road that the idea comes and the genius strikes and sometimes, it happens moments before you go to the ring.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

Inspiration can hit you in the head at any time in any context. It could happen in a conversation. Talking to someone at a party, you can get an idea. But you've got to remember those inspirations.

Sometimes when we have to speak suddenly we come closer to the truth than when we have time to think.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.