Quotes About Process

At 4:32 I arrive at my desk, read what I have written the day before, rip it up, eat it, then sit, absolutely motionless for a period of six hours and eighteen minutes, waiting to be inspired

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.

Look at Goethe, at Lamartine and at many others! To depict feelings on this high plane, you must give up the process of minute and insignificant observation which is the bane of the artists of to-day.

God is using the difficulties of the here and now to transform you, that is, to rescue you from you. And because he loves you, he will willingly interrupt or compromise your momentary happiness in order to accomplish one more step in the process of rescue and transformation, which he is unshakably committed to.

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

In this life and death case, I felt Mrs. Schiavo should receive the fullest due process from our legal system.

All things were interconnected with a sacred bond. Nature was in a process of constant change, using the universal substance to mould now a horse, then when the horse dies a tree, then a man. It was crucial, Marcus believed, for us to realize that we were part of the universe and to be in harmony with it:

usually little response until two or three treatments

What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can't write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.

Writing is more than typing words: Any action that is instrumental in completing a writing project counts as writing.

Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing.

Even though I've written more than a hundred short stories I always think that I will never come up with another decent one. It's agony.

The artist does not ascribe to the natural form of appearance the same convincing significance as the realists who are his critics. He does not feel so intimately bound to that reality, because he cannot see in the formal products of nature the essence of the creative process. He is more concerned with formative powers than with formal products.

The federal government is a ponderous battleship, weighed down by its own armor and slow to change course. But when it chooses to marshal its might against an individual, the government is a lean, mean, conviction machine. Meanwhile, the defendant's lawyer is a loinclothed Roman gladiator protected by a wooden shield, leather shin guards, and prayers to the god Jupiter. The Constitution promises due process but not a fair fight.

Granny was sizzling butter in an iron skillet on the gas range, and I was working the chicken-fried steak assembly line. I had just dropped a slab of meat into a bowl of flour, turning it over to coat both sides. Then I dipped the meat into a bowl of milk and eggs, letting the steak swim a bit. Finally, I put it back into the flour. That's how you bread steak

Instead of focusing on isolated objects and events, we can expand our fixed perspective and allow the deeper process (often taking the form of a mythic narrative of some sort) that is animating events to reveal itself. Instead of superimposing our limiting ideas and beliefs onto the waking dream, we can allow life to show its dreamlike nature to us.

Learning lines is on my mind until I do know them. I'll read the paper or paint the house to keep from starting to memorize. I've never found an easy way.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow – just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they right it down. It's simple.

So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time.

The designer does not, as a rule, begin with some preconceived idea. Rather, the idea is (or should be) the result of careful study and observation, and the design a product of that idea.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

There was a cable-TV program that documented how Peeps are made, and it showed unlimited hordes of Peeps bouncing merrily down a conveyor belt, right toward the camera. I came.

There's always a way if you're not in a hurry.

An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.