"In the emotional reaction to a work of art, you do not fill in from yourself; you leave yourself."

"Fiction is the art form of human yearning."

"Poetry doesn't have to acknowledge the passing of time.  The poem is an object on the page in many ways.  Line length is part of the form.  You can have a poem that just walks around in a timeless state as an object."

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

"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."

"I went to ... a great theater school.  And despite a lot of success, I decided I wanted to write instead of interpret."

"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."

"Artists are not intellectuals.  We are sensualists, we are ravenous for life."

"They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. [Athletes] call it muscle memory. But for you [the artist], it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory."

"This is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us."

"Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that’s what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art." (artist)

"The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses."

"One of the ways of understanding your unconscious is by realizing that in order to get into it you have to actually stop that garbagey analytical reflex voice in your head and induce a kind of trance state."

"The human condition resides in the details, the sense details."

"Once you are engaged in writing a piece of fiction from your unconscious, it is crucial that you write every day, because the nature of this place where you go is such that it's very difficult to find your way in. It's pure torture. But even though it's terrible getting in, once you’re in, if you keep going back every day, though it's still always daunting and difficult and scary, it's not nearly so much so."

"The way you'll know that you're writing from your head [rather than from your intuition] is that you'll look at your story and find it full of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretation."

"Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists. The objects we create are sensual objects."

"Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it's going to show."

"Consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness."

"That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous."

"Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order. "

"The artist shares her intuition of the world's order with the philosophers, the theologians, the scientists, the psychoanalysts—there are lots of people who believe there is order in the universe."

"You have to let go of that comforting, distancing voice, you have to then descend into that deep dream space of yours, and that will result in a kind of superconcentration. Psychologists call it the 'flow state,' being in the flow. Athletes call it being 'in the zone.'"

"If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, we're going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from."

"The artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won't let them think."

"The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection."

"For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?" (artist)

"Because of the creative writing pedagogy in this country, and because of the nature of this art form, and because of the medium you work with, and because of the rigors of artistic vision, and because of youth, and because no one has ever told you these things clearly, the great likelihood is that all of the fiction you've written is mortally flawed [stemming from analyzation rather than the unconscious]."

"Fiction [is] the exploration of the human condition and yearning ... its compass."

"You're going to be, and probably always have been, led to avert your eyes. But turning from that path is what it means to be an artist. You need courage, and that's something I can't teach you. I can teach you that you've got to have it."

"A work of art is an organic thing. Every detail must organically resonate with every other detail." (artist)

"It is the imagination that must be a strong and supple instrument, ready to lead the reader through moment-by-moment sensual experience."

"Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing? No. Just no. No. No.  The only way to create a work of literary art is to stop that voice. Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious."

"When you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place ... whatever scared the hell out of you down there—and there's plenty—you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art—even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily."

"You have to tell your mind to back the hell off. It's another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art."

"Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you."

(written by Robert Olen Butler)