254 Process Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I would rather start a family than finish one.

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

I really do work in solitude.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

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

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

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

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Proceed. You have my biased attention.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm: (1) write down the problem; (2) think very hard; (3) write down the answer.

Now it is no longer a matter of deciding what to do, but of deciding how to decide.

World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing - specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.

After materials are carried into the factory, nothing but products should be carried out from it.

A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting 'without haste, but without rest' of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.

I sense that novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3 - although it writes much faster than I can spell.

Like I say, the way I write songs is, you know, inspirational. I have to wait for it to happen. And when it happens I get lines, and I just write them down, you know. I'm not sort of a Tin Pan Alley sort of songwriter. I just sort of write down what I get - without censoring or questioning what it is and what it means, you know. Like later on I look at what it means, but not at the time.

Much needs to occur, however, between the collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record. For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

Romeo wasn't bilked in a day.

Silently as a dream the fabric rose - No sound of hammer or of saw was there.

But, as it is, this pied collection begs your indulgence - it's been spun from threads both sad and humoristic, themes popular or idealistic, products of carefree hours, of fun, of sleeplessness, faint inspirations, of powers unripe, or on the wane, of reason's icy intimations, and records of a heart in pain.

It is the process that is godliness, not so much the end result. A godly man will involve himself in the process of being godly. For godliness is not so much a place we are going as it is the going itself.

'I am ... aware that there are those who feel that national unity could be hastened by pressing some buttons and out comes the results, (but) I want to remind you again that the attainment of genuine reconciliation and unity is a long term process.'

Emilio and I like projects to breathe and grow. We started with a concept -- write songs, make demos, then let the guest stars listen to them and then afffect the writing process. For Jose Feliciano, I had written a chorus and a bit of a melody. He started playing the chorus and ad-libbing. I went, 'This is the [stuff]! Forget my melody!' Carlos Santana worked just the other way. He wanted me to record a plished take singing first, so his playing could recreate my emotion. I got goose bumps [writing '90 Millas']. Like in 'Esperando,' which is addressed to Cubans on the island. Those of us in America, we're like the bogeyman, but I wanted Cubans at home to know: Whatever happened doesn't matter. The future is for us to heal. Adn also: because we're here, we latched onto any part of our culture. Yes and no [this is a political record]. Politics is life, so yes. but it's not specific. Saying that 90 miles haven't divided us sends a message about freedom for Cuba -- and for everyone.

A pair of scissors is a ... wonderful instrument ... an occupation I can lose myself in ... my pleasure in cutting things out grows ever greater. Why didn't I think of it before.

The left hand of creation

signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...

Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

All is well that ends well.

What I do when I write is that i'll do a raggedy, rough version just to hear the chorus, just to see how much I like the chorus. If it works for me that way when it's raggedy, then I'll know it will just work... Listen to that, that's at home. Janet, Randy, Me... Janet and I are going 'Whoo, Whoo... Whoo, Whoo...' I do that same process with every song. It's the melody, it's the melody that's most important, If the melody can sell me, then I'll go to the next step The idea is to transcribe from what's in your mentality onto tape If you take a song like 'Billie Jean,' Where the bass line is the prominent, dominant piece, the protagonist of the song, the main driving riff that you here, getting the character of the riff to be just the way you want it to be, that takes a lot of time. Listen, you're hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, and that's what gives it character, but it takes a lot of work. ~Michael Jackson listening to an early writing version of Billie Jean on his iPhone, Ebony Magazine December 2007.

'The Pacific Way ... is not a thing or state; it is the working out of a process. (But) ... the most important things in life are the most difficult to measure ... love, peace of mind, creativity, fulfillment, maturity or wisdom, for example.'

Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced.

In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed creativity; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident. In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed The Absolute. In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, eminent reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

'For me,' he explains his mammoth project, 'it is an obligation to know and learn to understand the various styles living within the guitar, to work with them and pursue them up to a certain point and, when I feel I have learned enough about them, to let them go again. These CDs are a form of pool, a rucksack with everything I have at the moment and what I have focused on.' (Suddeutsche Zeitung, August 1997, Ralf Dombrowski)

'You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing.'

'Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.'

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

Finality is not the language of politics.

I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe.

The spirit of a warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a warrior's last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing that his intent is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs.

Oh! We already, we done already done it, done it, dammit! I could you know, like, sing a thing, and then not sing it for a little while, and then sing it again... and people would be like, 'Why'd he sing that again?'

You want to be able to provide something, and you're pissing down a fucking well. It will suck you dry and take everything you have and, like being a parent, you can pour as much love as you want, and your kid still says, 'Just let me right out here, you don't have to take me all the way.' You're working to make yourself obsolete. I'm not going to make Persona - my movies are fairly obvious in what the people want and what it is that's happening; it;s not that internalized. What's internalized is how you process the information from the singular, subjective point of view. And that becomes the subtext of it.

Filmmmaking encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelivably deceitful, and everything in between.

I tend to over-intellectualize things, to come at them from a structural point.

I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.

If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

It was on the train,with its rattle-ty bang,that is often so stimulating to a composer that I suddenly heard the complete construction of the Rhapsody. Comment on his Blue Rhapsody composition.

We love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process.

And all that time I couldn't work. So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn't trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel - the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.

Truly, Nature absorbed his attention, but I don't think he cared much for what is called the beauties of nature; it was her way of working, her mystery, her economy in extravagance; he delighted to trace her footsteps toward their source .... He liked to feel that the pursuit was endless, with mystery at both ends of it ....