Quotes About Inspiration

The only picture I've got in my house - other than family photos, of course - is one of me with Muhammad Ali.

Sometimes I'll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I'll just remember it.

'Creative director' is a catchall phrase for giving ideas. To me, it obviously means more than that. It's like being a counselor.

'Everything is four' is a phrase that has been coined before me. Four is a number of completion. Four is a number that's literally all around.

All my childhood memories of my mother, is that of someone who was just superwoman, before the phrase was even invented.

I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.

If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

I'll hear a phrase around me that someone says... I'll write it down in my notebook, and as soon as I'll sit down with my guitar, I'll come up with the rest of the arrangement there.

My brother and I semi-coined a phrase back in 2007, 'Don't Forget to be Awesome.'

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and 'good, orderly direction' to enter.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

Creative burnout and physical burnout is real. I mean, there are moments when I get home - after overseeing, you know, almost 16 collections a year - where I can't move.

I get bursts of creativity with bursts of physical activity.

I don't want to feel shamed into making a choice about my physical appearance or my body... or even about the choices I make about my life. I want to be feel empowered and inspired because they feel good to me.

I think we all have this special equation with our art where we don't feel the need for anything else; it almost gives you everything. It gives you physical strength, it gives you mental peace.

There's no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world.