Terence McKenna (Terence Kemp McKenna) Quotes
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
Quotes to Explore
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I feel like most creative people are total freaks.
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I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
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I like using animals because they help suspend my reader's disbelief. We have certain ideas about dentists. We don't have many ideas about rhinoceros dentists.
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I done made music with Makonnen, Frank Ocean. We all make great music.
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I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
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I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
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It is, I think, the very chaos of America that allowed me to prosper.
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No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
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Action set pieces are my absolute favorite thing to write. I'm pretty much always in the mood to do them, but music certainly helps the process. I usually brainstorm out the dynamics and choreography of a fight to music beforehand - it gives me the little sparks of imagination when I get to the gaps in my own creativity.
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Actually, 'Wayne's World 2' I kind of liked. I think 'Wayne's World 2' does have some creative things in it, some ideas in it.
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I love spreadsheets. I do all the finances. I pay the publicists. I have to compartmentalize the creative and the business, so there are sacrifices. But ultimately, I get to be the CEO of my own business.
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Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.
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Theory should be ever more demanding of our empirical resources. Simultaneously, data should be ever more demanding of the empirical relevance of theory and of the theorist's expertise in working imaginatively on problems of the world, rather than on stylized problems of the imagination.
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I learnt so much wit, really, from the Globe audiences. If you can make a circle, even in a proscenium theater, if you can get a circular energy going, so that all these people are involved with it and present, then there is something curious that happens with the imagination.
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New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely.
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So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
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Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.
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If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.
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Love is a choice. Total forgiveness is a choice. It is not a feeling-at least at first-but is rather an act of the will. It is the choice to tear up the record of wrongs we have been keeping.
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The turnip is a capricious vegetable, which seems reluctant to show itself at its best.
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If there is no X to mark the spot, there is no spot.
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The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
