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Creativity Quotes
"A balanced program for tax reform based upon the common sense idea of lowering taxes out of surplus revenues."
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"In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself."
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"The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."
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"You have to be an artist and a madman..."
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"The time has come ' the Walrus said 'To talk of many things Of shoes - and ships - and sealing-wax - Of cabbages - and kings - And why the sea is boiling hot - And whether pigs have wings.'"
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"Why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much- Mark Twain ...that's why ..."
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"At Wal-Mart, if you couldn't explain an idea or a concept in simple terms on one page of paper Sam Walton considered the new idea too complicated to implement."
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"Thoughts have creative energy exhilaration is required to creates dissolves and recreates."
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"Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular."
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"I write out of my intellectual experience."
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"Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting."
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"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."
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"We like to take credit when we get a new idea, as if we originated the idea in our brain, but what we actually did was no less extraordinary: we channeled the idea."
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"If I had some idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?"
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"A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation."
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"I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'"
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"It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants."
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"Being able to write an idea down succinctly doesn't make that idea any better than one which rambles on a bit. It just comes to the point sooner."
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"You can feel creative tension when you sense the freedom to be creative, the harmony not via compliance only, but through brainstorming."
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"It's as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint it. There is the art of lines and colours but the art of words exists too and will never be less important."
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"Creativity is applied Imagination."
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"In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping."
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"Creativity is more important than imagination because it requires action."
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"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
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"It was just an idea I had, that it could be cool to have a book covered in fake fur."
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"I don't think that a company should own a studio and the network, and program for their own network. It hurts the creativity - it is not a level playing field."
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"My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered."
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"PARAPHRASE: Genius is not that you are smarter than everyone else. It is that you are ready to receive the inspiration."
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"Your manuscript is both good and original but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good."
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"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
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"Whether we write lyrics or craft legislation, sell homes or teach classes, design spaces or open franchises, prayer is a critical part of the creative process. Don't just brainstorm; praystorm."
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"Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is."
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"The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody."
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"To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again."
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"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
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"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed."
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"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."
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"Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation."
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"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
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"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."
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"If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself."
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"The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer."
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"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper."
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"I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking."
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"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRODI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."
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"Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive."
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"By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death."
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"I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business."
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