Unexpected Creativity Quotes

Novelty in all things is charming.

Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I'm going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It's always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.

I can't compose or play music; I'm not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me... until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it.

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth.

The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’

Script is not finished until it's finished. There's many times, partway through a film, when an idea comes, and I say, "How beautiful this is. This thing was not complete and look what's happened, look what's come along." And it just came along at what might be called a strange time rather than a normal time.

Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

Breakthroughs, in art, in culture, in personality, come when tackling the unexpected.

I think that so much of the creative process is a fragmentary one, and then it's about just allowing your intuition to put it together for you. It's funny how you create something and you think you're going in a million different directions, and then the thing you end up with is the thing that you wanted to create your whole life, but you're just as surprised by it as anybody else.

I play like I always used to, with no agenda. And, every once in a while, I will play something I really hadn't thought about or even intended to play. And I'll go, 'Whoa! What was that?'

I am the first to be surprised and often terrified by the images that I see appear on my canvas.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

The good part of writing is where it gets out of your control and turns into something else. You look at it and think "Whoa, where did that come from? That wasn't what I meant to write, but it's more interesting than what I was intending. Which part of my subconscious or my experience did that come from?" Often the answer isn't clear, and often the line between fiction and fact isn't clear, either.

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

To me, writing is like singing in the most inappropriate place, singing as beautifully as you can on a bus or in a bank, where people least expect it, and trying to get them to want to listen.

The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows.

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.