Selected process quotes

1. The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

2. Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

3. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

4. Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart.

5. My work comes first, reasons for it follow.

6. Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.

7. My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

8. If I see an ending, I can work backward.

9. You can never discard too many bad ideas.

10. I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

11. All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

12. Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.

13. I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

14. I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

15. Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

16. Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating.

17. Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

18. I would rather start a family than finish one.

19. Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

20. I really do work in solitude.

21. It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

22. My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

23. In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

24. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

25. Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

26. What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

27. By circumstance and perhaps also by inclination, I think in complete intellectual isolation. To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food.

28. Actual creativeness is a matter of moments. One has to piece together the minute grains to make a lump. And it is so easy to miss the momentary flashes, it is like sluicing in placer mining. He who lets the flakes float by has nothing to show for his trouble.

29. We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.

30. Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.

31. Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

32. I put the words down and push them a bit.

33. All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

34. Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

35. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

36. Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

37. When you are happy it is harder to write [songs].

38. When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

39. I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

40. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

41. Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.

42. We can look upon a road from two different points of view. One regards it as dividing us from the object of desire; in that case we count every step of our journey over it as something attained by force in the face of obstruction. The other sees it as the road which leads us to our destination; and as such is part of our goal. It is already the beginning of our attainment, and by journeying over it we can only gain that which in itself it offers to us.

43. I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

44. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a barroom, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a roadcut.

45. Art was always a means to an end with me. You get and idea, and you just can't wait. Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting.

46. If you have formed a circle to go into, Go into it yourself and see how you would do.

47. Art is not a thing; it is a way

48. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

49. If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be 'identical with themselves', the old dictum that 'everything is identical with itself' becomes in [today's understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts.' (Note: Korzybski used '1933' to specify the current understanding. This editor has subsituted the 'more general' form: [today's understanding...])

50. Take your time, and your patience will be rewarded.

51. Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict.

52. The subject says 'I see first lots of things which dance - then everything becomes gradually connected'.

53. Law is a bottomless pit.

54. Parity is for farmers.

55. I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done, so now I just have to fill in the rest.

56. As there was never any question there was never any answer. ~ Ch.1

57. Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care. ~ Ch. 2

58. Know, think, choose, do.

59. All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

60. When we look at what is taking place in the world we begin to understand that there is no outer and inner process; there is only one unitary process, it is a whole, total movement, the inner movement expressing itself as the outer and the outer reacting again on the inner. To be able to look at this seems to me all that is needed, because if we know how to look, then the whole thing becomes very clear, and to look needs no philosophy, no teacher. Nobody need tell you how to look. You just look. Can you then, seeing this whole picture, seeing it not verbally but actually, can you easily, spontaneously, transform yourself? That is the real issue. Is it possible to bring about a complete revolution in the psyche?

61. A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, rather, he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn't think, he acts: and it's nothing he can explain, he just feels how things should go. Even though neither you nor I would arrive at any definite plans, etc., by talking together perhaps we could mutually strengthen the feeling that something is ripening within us. And that is what I should like...

62. Edward Smith: Why is it more of a pleasure to do 30 or 40 pictures than to do just one? Andy Warhol: Then I can, uh, listen to my soundabout which looks just like the thing that I'm wearing now, and you can listen to opera and stuff like that. Edward Smith: Does that mean you don't have to think when you're painting? Andy Warhol: No, you can listen to really good music. Edward Smith: So, what, painting is an excuse to listen to really good music? Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah.

63. I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. Its inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.

64. How long Do works endure? As long As they are not completed.

65. The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

66. In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no 'things.' NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is 'no-thingness.' We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, an nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness - no-thingness - is a form of process, ever moving.

67. Et a quoi bon executer des projets, puisque le projet est en lui-meme une jouissance suffisante?

68. Anyway, it gets into one's blood, this long lonely way of writing, like a long sea-voyage.

69. Well, a novel does acquire a certain kind of richness when you work on it for a long time that can't really be faked.

70. The real Scott is to be found in his notebooks and working papers, where he elaborated so patiently at turning the mess of his life to gold. 'To observe one must be unwary,' he wrote, so he took experience straight without a notebook. But he later hoarded it like a miser and pored over it like a monk illuminating a manuscript and produced enduring work. When a writer explores emotions to danger point like Scott, it is worse than philistine to talk about weakness of character. The whole moral test is in the books. The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are all the character reference a writer could want.

71. And there is a new history now that has been done, and that history needs to be included in the process.

72. The, uh, questionnaire that she filled out is an important questionnaire, and, uh, obviously they will address the questions that, uh, the senators have in the questionnaire, uh, as a result of the answers to the questions in the questionnaire. [smiles]

73. His pen squeaking like a demented wren as he wrote copious notes.

74. If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.

75. At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness - I re-enter through the breach - and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again.

76. There is an impelling proportion of tones that may lead me to change the shape of a figure or to transform my composition. Until I have achieved this proportion in all the parts of a composition I strive towards it and keep on working. Then a moment comes when all the parts have found their definite relationships, and from then on it would be impossible for me to add a stroke to my picture without having to repaint it entirely.

77. The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.

78. The first stage through which the food substances introduced from without must pass, is the digestive canal; the first vital action on these substances, or to be more exact and objective, their first participation in life, in its process, constitutes what we call the digestion.

79. That story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day (more than 2 years ago) with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down, and then copy out.

80. There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture. Soon the canvas became so large that he had to get a ladder; and he ran up and down it, putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there.

81. Guy: So what's going on in the studio today?

82. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I do not expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

83. In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak, If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.

84. His manner of Studie was thus:About every three houres his man was to bring him a roll and a pott of Ale to refocillate his wasted spirits: so he studied and dranke, and munched some bread; and this maintained him till night, and then, he made a good Supper: now he did well not to dine, which breakes off one's fancy, which will not presently be regained: and 'tis with Invention as a flux, when once it is flowing, it runnes amaine: if it is checked, flowes but guttim [drop by drop]: and the like for perspiration, check it, and 'tis spoyled.

85. And so I penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.

86. (After playing 'Higher State Of Consciousness' by Josh Wink for the second time:) I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that sounded better when I played it the other night, at the wrong speed.

87. I haven't had any particular direction in my music. I just do it the way I feel it at the time.

88. It's fascinating to watch a show develop from a script to a 22-minute comedy. I try to learn as much, and ask as many questions, as I can without being annoying.

89. I had always considered Kate Bush truly original both as a performer and as a songwriter with an unusually fresh sense of harmony. If her new album next month is awaited with some excitement after a long fallow period, then in 1985 it was assumed that Hounds of Love would be something of a final fling at the conclusion of a waning career. I soon realised how wrong this assumption was when Kate sent me a cassette: it was zany, ambitious and yet utterly Kate Bush, but with gaps where I was to do her bidding. Having chatted at length, she sent me a long letter with the words of the song and precise instructions on how it should unfold... Structure was carefully delineated, verses and choruses written out fully and marked up in colour, and she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms.

90. As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words. You can deal with that... :-)

91. It's not really a rule--it's more like a trend.

92. : No comment, since this is still hovering (see Larry's reply). Flutter, flutter.

93. Proceed. You have my biased attention.

94. Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel. In fact, nobody who expects to have time left over to actually do any real kernel work will read even half. Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea. None of the individual gnomes read all the postings either, they just work together really well.

95. In the early days of the DCC I preferred to let the proponents do their thing and then see how it all worked out in the end. Now we are pretty close to the end.

96. Before war can be fought, a long series of necessary steps, which quite obviously are not and cannot be enforced steps, must be taken by the mass of men. Naval and military budgets must be voted in parliaments and congresses, not just once or twice in a generation but year after year; not secretly, but accompanied by long and public discussion, the budgets being supported by members of parliament, or deputies or congressmen who are still in many states continuously reelected in free and secret franchises, often by great majorities.

97. I write from instinct, from inexplicable sparkle. I don't know why I'm writing what I'm writing. Usually, I sit and I let my hands wander on my guitar. And I sing anything. I play anything. And I wait till I come across a pleasing accident. Then I start to develop it. Once you take a piece of musical information, there are certain implications that it automatically contains - the implication of that phrase elongated, contracted, or inverted or in another time signature. So you start with an impulse and go to what your ear likes.

98. At least once every five years every form should be put on trial for its life.

99. The writer does not get from his work as he writes and reads it the same aesthetic shock that the reader does; and since the writer is so accustomed to reading other stories, and having them produce a decided effect upon him, he is disquieted at not being equally affected by his own.

100. At 7 a.m. all my voices start talking inside my head, and when it reaches a certain pitch I jump out and trap them before they're gone. Or I shower and then the voices talk. You solve problems not by thinking directly of them but allowing them to ferment in their own time.