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Creativity Quotes
"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."
40
"It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa."
40
"I refer to calls for humanitarian intervention in the affairs of another state - a new idea, this - even when they are made under the pretext of defending human rights and freedoms."
39
"The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion."
39
"A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something."
39
"We don't let them have ideas. Why would we let them have guns?"
39
"For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible..."
39
"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
38
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
38
"I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can."
37
"To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion."
37
"A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs."
36
"You can have manic-depression without having an ounce of creativity."
36
"The same Source that gave you the idea, will give you the means to see it through."
36
"It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life."
36
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."
35
"I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years."
35
"Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats."
35
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers."
35
"I just wanted to have fun for myself - I felt I had a lot to say, and I realized that I missed having a magazine as a place to express my ideas. The Times column is a place for me to unload those perceptions."
34
"When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left."
34
"You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."
34
"Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself."
34
"I'll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me."
33
"To stay ahead, you must have your next idea waiting in the wings."
33
"Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still."
33
"What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock 'n roll records to trendy customers."
33
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
33
"To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step."
33
"That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon."
33
"You have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing."
33
"Ingenuity is the ability to solve difficult problems, often in an original and creative way."
33
"It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."
32
"I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now."
32
"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."
32
"Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found."
31
"Artists think along the edges of the box, because that's where things get done. That's where the audience is, that's where the means of production are available, and that's where you can make an impact."
31
"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."
31
"Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one."
31
"If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea."
31
"The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame."
31
"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."
31
"Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material."
31
"Blue Movie was based on an idea that Stanley Kubrick had. Somebody came by one day with some porn footage."
30
"Putting a stamp on things just helps you say, 'Hey, yesterday I was there, and today I'm here.' It's another step forward, and it feels like another turning point and an unleashing of creativity, and now I'm going to start focusing on the show and the production, the fun stuff that comes with it."
30
"I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence."
30
"When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language."
30
"An artist is one who has mastered the art of dissolving himself so completely that only his work remains!"
30
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