Quotes About Process

You know for some strange reason I like to write the verse first. I mean I know the majority of people do the chorus first and when I think about it, I guess it does make more sense to do the chorus first, but I just like to write the verses first, I don't know why.

Not everything we write will be great. That's natural.

Of course I had. That's how I do it.

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children?

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children?

When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process. But

T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process.

The measuring and mixing always smoothed out her thinking processes - nothing was as calming as creaming butter - and when the kitchen was warm from the oven overheating and the smell of baking chocolate, she took final stock of where she'd been and where she was going. Everything was fine.

Sometimes the point isn't to end up with something worth showing the world. Sometimes it's just rehearsal.

That is the only way to get a kettle to boil up the river. If it sees that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing. You have to go away and begin your meal, as if you were not going to have any tea at all. You must not even look round at it. Then you will soon hear it sputtering away, mad to be made into tea.

Why are we concerned with art? To cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness - fulfil ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent.

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The

Un libro, così come una persona, rimane qualcosa di imperfetto, di incompiuto, durante tutta la sua creazione. Alla fine della gestazione la persona nasce, poi cresce. Ma ritengo che un libro sia vivo solo mentre viene scritto. Dopo, al meno per me, muore.

The effort flops like a just-caught fish inside her. A brief burst of possibility as the name is typed onto the screen, as she clicks to activate the search. Hope thrashing in the process of turning cold.

It all happens in a matter of seconds: the sphere, so precise at the start, emerges, perfectly round, like an egg yolk that then slips from its shell.

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

The artist himself is often surprised at the finished work of art. He cannot tell 'how it happened', nor could he repeat the feat at someone's bidding.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.

I see no thread running through my work; I simply get on with my life and my painting.

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

I didn't want it to have any technical virtuosity; I wanted it to just be really clear how it was made. For my work in general, it's always really clear how it is made.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.