I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.
It's very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.
There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
It sounds a bit pretentious, but I'm never really conscious of what I'm doing musically.
Sometimes, I make music in my sleep. So I get up, put on my headphones, and compose it on the piano.
We don't really intentionally try to sound like ourselves. I think that would be overthinking.
My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.
Sometimes I play something, and I haven't recorded it, and I don't know where it came from, why my hands did what they did, what key it was in, anything.
