When the sun shines they slip into the shade
Thom Yorke talking to Alec Baldwin (2013):
Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I've found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space.Brian Eno talking to Lester Bangs (1979):
It's like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you've got to stop when that happens.
There's a threshold... if you want to shift with your work, if you want to shift. If you're writing, if you're being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, "I'm constantly creating, I've got this mountain of brilliant ideas," you're making the basic mistake that you're assuming all your ideas are brilliant.
One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.Barry Gifford talking to Robert Birnbaum (2003):
Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing, serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's not a competitive sport. I was an athlete -- you know that -- I mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other guy, the other team. This is not that way. I prefer to think of it as entirely subjective. "Comparisons are odious" as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy.
I basically write when inspired. I don't feel it's necessary to write every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.