Quotes About Process

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

I do listen to a lot of music, but I don't listen when I'm writing.

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

I started writing songs in high school, so you had to write this stuff out and register it with the Library of Congress. You had to learn how to do that stuff.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

history takes a long time to happen.

Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.

Also, there was a Princeton study that found that visual clutter reduces your ability to focus and process information.

Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.

Research supports his observation: It's not goal attainment, but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.

Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process

I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it… I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop.

Why don't you go grind some almonds?

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing—grinding, buffing, and polishing—not writing.

Sportswriter Red Smith described writing by saying, "You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.

Human beings, rulers of the animal world, had created their own destruction. A process of natural selection, often very badly organized, periodically topples our crown.

Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.

To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal. The

Purging was part of his grieving process—

There is no relation to sound for deaf people. It is a totally different mental process.

I'm usually the last man on the totem pole. Except for the sound effects and the final sound mix, the score is the last element to be added to a picture.