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Creativity Quotes
"If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it."
297
"Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong."
165
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."
156
"Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?"
156
"Australia is properly speaking an island, but it is so much larger than every other island on the face of the globe, that it is classed as a continent in order to convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude."
142
"As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart."
131
"It's all trotters in Sweden, so that's what's always caught my eye."
128
"There is an idea of democracy produced by one-sided thinking."
126
"I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old."
125
"I had the idea that I should beat up every player I tangled with and nothing ever convinced me it wasn't a good idea."
124
"Colonialism is an idea born in the West that drives Western countries - like France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain - to occupy countries outside of Europe."
124
"Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way."
124
"No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it."
123
"He was driven by the idea that when Milosevic grabs a part of Bosnia, Croatia should get a piece of it, too."
120
"You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be."
117
"Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever."
115
"And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?"
111
"Creativity is just connecting things."
111
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
110
"And for every project, because it takes years, you can see the early drawings and collages as just a simple, vague idea, and through the years and through the negotiations of getting the permit, you see that every detail is now clarified."
110
"Every writer has to find their own way into writing."
109
"A nation must be embraced, rehabilitated and expressed as a tangible sign of human creativity and as an integral element of mankind's heritage."
107
"The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas."
106
"There are some who are scared by unity and by building a country on the basis of ideas."
100
"I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties."
98
"Sweet as sweetest Grecian honey will my song be when I sing, O Beloved, in the season of the Spring!"
95
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
92
"If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate."
88
"It was actually Peter's idea that I should make the film. He called me in the very beginning, and I hadn't even read the book. So I read it and I liked it very much and I knew I'd certainly like to do it."
76
"Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!"
74
"If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it."
72
"There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt."
72
"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."
70
"The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market."
70
"Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life."
70
"I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here."
69
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
68
"You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere."
67
"The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."
67
"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."
66
"Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up."
66
"The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space... on the infinite highway of the air."
64
"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."
63
"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing."
62
"I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect."
61
"We'd be working in our motel room through the night, and I'd come up with an idea at two in the morning, and he'd start jumping up and down, pacing across the room, or whatever."
61
"If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on."
58
"Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still."
58
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