"Writers don't decide what symbols mean. Symbols arise from the text."

"I try to share what I've learned with other magicians, just as mentors did with me.  Magicians talk quite freely about secrets within the industry, but we don't share anything with people outside of the industry.  I actually believe magicians should talk about their secrets with the public more than they do.  By keeping our art form completely secret, we're actually devaluing it."

"It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted [in art] or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience."

"Art comes from the place where you dream.  It comes from your unconscious.  It comes from your white-hot center."

"Where it all came from—the other mother with her button eyes, the rats, the hand, the sad voices of the ghost-children—I have no real idea. It built itself and told itself, a word at a time."

"Art does NOT come from the mind.  It does not come from your rational, analytical faculties.  It does not come from ideas.  It does not come from theories.  It does not come from philosophies.  You don't write a book in order to express a theme or make symbols.  That's NOT the process."

"Magic is a fascinating and primal thing.  What's most interesting is the psychology behind it.  People are desperate to experience wonder.  We are desperate to find mystery in our lives.  I believe it's innate; it's so hard-wired into our brains that we can't escape it."

"We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know."

"[Writing] akes a long time.  There is no rushing it, and the work exists on its own timetable, outside of your own personal deadlines."

"The only places I feel most at home in, exist in my 'portable world'; those democratic spaces where my kith and kin from the Republics of Imagination and Ideas reside."

"The 'how' of what that process is down there, I have no idea.  All I know is that characters keep emerging, voices keep speaking to me, and I keep writing them down."

"I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't."

"Sometimes, in our creative frenzy, we were not even conscious of what we were writing."

"If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful tale."

"I often start something and have no idea how it'll end.  The sense of surprise there, to me, is like magic every time." 

"One of the benefits I get from doing [book] covers is, I get to read.  The main thing I like about what I do is that I'm away from reality and the real world where I live, in a make believe one—a land of someone else's imagination—as long as the project lasts.  I need that to survive." (artist)

[The student writer] only vaguely knows that successful writers have overcome the difficulties which seem almost insuperable to him; he believes that accepted authors have some magic, or at the very lowest, some trade secret, which, if he is alert and attentive, he may surprise.  He suspects, further, that the teacher who offers his services knows that magic, and may drop a word about it which will prove an ['Open, Says Me'] to him.  In the hope of hearing it, or surprising it, he will sit doggedly through a series of instructions in story types and plot forming and technical problems which have no relation to his own dilemma.  He will buy or borrow every book with 'fiction' in the title; he will read any symposium by authors in which they tell their methods of work.  In almost every case, he will be disappointed.

"Call it whatever you like—spirit, soul, psyche, personality, ego, unified field, inner being.  It is somewhere intangible, not physical, from whence these creations come.  Yet, by being put down on paper—letters into words, words into paragraphs, paragraphs into an essay—they join the physical realm."

"The surprise of what you'll find after rendering an image and how different if often comes out is the exact same thing I love about writing poems."

"When I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before."

"The Interview Fallacy [is] the fraudulent claim that the artist always knew what he was doing and how he was doing it and can explain the whole business judiciously later when the fires of the work have cooled." (artist)

"It wasn't fantasy, but there was just something... like, I'd paint a still life but the colors wouldn't be quite like you'd expect them to be.  That's the magic of it, and I love it—the world building that occurs on the canvas as it does on the page."

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."

"What I most love about writing: the weird alchemy of arranging words in the hope that it produces something magical."

"There's always a stretch (and sometimes a few) in writing a novel when that intensity kicks in and you feel it taking over everything, even your time away from the desk.  It's a weird trick, your mind craving that imaginary world."

"People think you make the gold of your poem out of nothing like Midas or something, but you don't.  You make the gold of your poem out of the seams of ore that you find."

"A mysterious force has been guiding us, and when we trust this, we connect to the aliveness of our story."

"A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you feel like a character is taking over at certain points.  I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things.  You've created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own."

"A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.  Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to.  When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery.  A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props.  If it can be made to feel somehow relevant to you, rather than mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and the trick more impact."

"I exhort poets to become like Felix the Cat, the cartoon character I grew up watching, who has a magic bag of tricks from which he can pull countless, miraculous items or which he can transform in an instant into whatever his mind conjures up."

"Being creatively satisfied means that you possess the faith that as you connect the dots of your inspiration, bridges will form—and yet more dots will appear.  Once you settle into the idea that that can continue forever, then you are satisfied knowing that there will always be something that draws you in, compels you, and drives you to look closer.  There will always be another way to express yourself.  It's a dance that never ends."

"With creative people ... there are always intrusions, hints or clues from ways of thinking that certainly appear foreign, and creative people use those hints and clues to construct an art, a musical composition or whatever. They sense a surge of power beneath."

"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"The sense of wonder is the marvelous heart of every great science fiction or fantasy story.  It comes from the surprise of discovery.  It comes from the recognition of the magic within.  Most of all, it comes from the realization—the acknowledgment—of something new in the universe."

"Of all the things I've learned about writing, this is the most important: There's a domain of excitement and eagerness and delight that can be astonishing.  It is a place of commitment and discovery and wonderment.  It is the far side of passion.  It is totality of purpose, an inspired obsession.  I like to call it stardrive.  It's the engine at the center of your personal starship.  It's your heart of brightness.  It is who you really are.  It is simply you—you are the source."

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands."

"As designers, we go into another world, into the unknown, so it's important to be experimental and think outside of the box.  We've continued to evolve, and photography has now become a huge part of what we do.  I love it because you can capture the world around you, finding and sharing magic in the everyday.  That's what we're about."

"The creation of a book is such a private and solitary process, and in so many ways is simply irretrievable—a writer can so very rarely specify exactly what was going on for him or her when s/he was writing a particular passage or scene. This is part of why the fun of writing and reading never goes away, because you can just never get to the bottom of it."

"Just seeing excellent films doesn't educate you at all, because they're mysterious.  A great film is mysterious.  There's no way of solving it.  Why does Citizen Kane work?  Well, it just does.  It's brilliant on very level, and there's no way of putting your finger on any on thing that's right.  It's just all right.  But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: 'I'll never do that, and I'll never do that, and I'll never do that.'"

"The dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel."

"Perhaps what we really crave is not to have more time or to have time off but to feel free of time. We want to experience what life would be like outside of time. Many people turn to drugs or alcohol just to have this experience. But we also experience this in dreams, stories, and our imagination. In these realms, we are free of time and space. (The opening phrase of fairy tales—'once upon a time'—doesn't mean 'a long time ago' but 'in a world beyond time.')"

"Something magical happened that night.  When I told that story, I felt an enormous listening coming from the audience, an enormous opening up.  I noticed that I could look into people's eyes more when I was speaking as myself as opposed to when I was speaking in character.  There was relating happening."

"Time-based work doesn't make as much sense as it once did, as ideas are not 'things' and can't be measured in units. An idea, conceived in just a moment, can have enormous implications. Thus an 'idea person' has a more flexible approach to time. She learns how to develop the special, and often quite eccentric, circumstances that encourage creativity, and to trust inspiration when it appears—no matter what the time. "

"The most important thing I've found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind)."

The View from the Cheap Seats

"Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know." (in answer to being asked to define jazz)

"I usually don't have a preconceived notion of what I'm going to create.  Most of the time I sketch with no goal or objective.  My hand will draw something and then it reveals itself to me."

"I don't know quite how the story will unfold.  I never write to a plan—but somehow, I know that I've 'seen' the entire book flash across my mind's eye like a speeded-up movie.  My process is to slow it all down, to start at Chapter 1 and write down what I see, scene by scene."

"Again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion or my Ouija subconscious again."

"Let the poem teach me about poetry and what language can do, rather than being the captain of the ship."

"Art is a much more mysterious process that is not fully in our control."

"What felt magic can becomes either undone or overdone when you try to make a story out of it. Especially when you're a story-maker. Neil is. I am. We both are. I watch the story unfold. Sometimes I dictate the story to myself, then sometimes to the world. Sometimes I take dictation. Sometimes I get it wrong."

"I found myself blessing the secret mind... observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.  We never sit anything out.  We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.  The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"You write and you write and you write in this business, but every now and then you come up with—I think it's the magical part of the process—an idea that is either exceptionally fresh or good."

"My best stories are the ones that don't feel entirely mine.  When I read them, I'm not sure how I wrote them."

"When you're finally in it—this is the part I really like—the writing just writes itself, it really does, and you're eager to get back to the work.  It's like reading a good book except you're writing it."

"The art of fiction is, in large part, the art of small-scale illusions."

"On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive.  On the best day, the act is transcendent.  The work is purifying and perfect even when it's not."

"If your response to stress is, 'Well, I'm going to hunker down and put out a little word count,' you've just trained your brain to basically turn straw into gold, or water into wine." (artist)

"No amount of knowledge or tenacity or craftsmanship can substitute for the alchemy of working on the right project at the right time."

"We often have to write three hundred pages before our soul discloses to us what it is that was waiting to be discovered."

"To open windows in these notions that get passed down to us about what reality is and what we're capable of—that's what keeps me going.  That's what makes me write every day—waiting and hoping and trying to make that happen: to write something that seems to open up a passageway into something else that we can't understand, but has a presence, feels utterly important and true."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

"If something happens in those spontaneous moments of writing that's different than my outline, I go with the spontaneity, and change the outline to suit it.  Because the spontaneity, that's the art.  My intentions are the craft, right?  That's what I'm trying to do.  But what is being done is where the magic is."

"It took me awhile to get to that place. But I think that once you have the confidence to write from your gut, that's when the magic really starts to happen."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." (artist)

"It's like it's all inside me just kind of trying to get out.  If I talk about it, it diffuses it, lets it out, and then maybe it wouldn't be as clear to me, or the characters wouldn't jump out of the page.  The dialogue wouldn't just jump out if I talked about it with people and they said, 'Oh yeah, that part's good, that part's...'  It's better for me to just keep it all bottled up and let the pressure build."

"Writing is a job. It isn't some special calling for the elite. It isn't some form of magic where the shaman practitioners must be deified. I'm a writer, and damn lucky to be one, but I'm no better than someone who makes toasters on an assembly line."

"Literature, to me, is a living creature.  I think that every writer owes it a debt that can never be paid in full."

"It's completely out of my hands.  That's the magical and destructive thing a writer has to face: control is much more of an illusion than you imagine."

(written by Robert Olen Butler)

"When you place your characters onstage and let them improvise, magic can happen."