The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time.

Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it.

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

Yes, influences are enriching, and they can be found in every work of art, even the most original.

Great music does not just make me feel good. It means something. It makes us understand. It makes us happy.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

If one uses music that one does not really love, then one will not succeed in making it one's own.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

The best way to investigate the elusive phenomenon called the creative process may well be to target all the misconceptions, to explain what the creative process is not.

To come to grips with creativity, I must ask creative, adventurous questions - the kind which, in all likelihood, cannot be answered.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.

There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love.

To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.

Truth implies meaning.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.

Truth is a big concept.

For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.

As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

When families observe a later, deeper stage of cult involvement they may find it necessary to consider the involvement of a professional such as myself in an intervention effort.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.