Unstructured Thinking Quotes

I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'

I never walk into the studio and say, I'm going to write a song called... 'X' or called 'Slow Me Down.' I write a ton of lyrics, often the title is somewhere in those 10 pages of... I call it brain vomit. It's kind of like whatever comes out of my head and I'm unabashedly just writing it down.

I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.

Writing is like listening to a melody line in my head. Note by note, it knows where it wants to go. I follow it and lay it down. I can pare it, shape it, and polish it later...My job is to take down the dribs and drabs - to free-associate, if you will, knowing that the associations have their own plans for where we're going with all this.

Sometimes when I'm just really relaxed, that's also a creative time for me, because that's when my mind is more open because I'm not worried or thinking or being very analytical.

I think it's important to be flexible and free, and you can't be free and spontaneous if you don't know what you're doing.

All are to be men of genius in their degree,--rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things, known and numbered, but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks, on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so pass on.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

On my walks, that's when the good ideas come. The kind of hard, gritty work is when you're sitting at the computer and it's kind of intense and you're kind of in super control of it - the walks are when you let go. That's when the really big breakthroughs come in, and it's very strange.

When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly.

There's a fine line between a stream of consciousness and a babbling brook to nowhere.

When I get bored, I'll zone out, and I'll just sit in front of my computer and start writing any random song that comes to mind.

I never really have to sit at a desk thinking, 'What should I do now?' It doesn't work like that for me, and it never has. My thinking process is constant.

Johnson didn’t keep a diary. He didn’t write notes to himself. He was uniquely a man of the telephone.

To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is not that abstract of a thing when I think about how my brain works - I feel like it's almost more realistic. That's how my brain works.

For me, the creative process, first of all, requires a good nine hours of sleep a night. Second, it must not be pushed by the need to produce practical applications.

The best way to write a song is to think of something else and then the song kind of creeps in. The beginning makes no sense whatsoever. It just, like, rhymes. And then all of a sudden I'll go into, I am an old woman named after my mother.

The more you think, the more you ruin things. Art has to come viscerally; otherwise, forget it.

I'm not really thinking about what I'm talking about or what I'm willing to achieve. I'm just kind of letting it come out, recording it.

I like to do things sort of intuitively, I think.

I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.

I would say that I'm opinionated and clumsy and I am definitely led by my heart over my head.

I'm very organic in nature with my creativity. It just kind of wraps around me, or it's a moment I have, a click of inspiration. It's never calculated.