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Creativity Quotes
"We learn to create, we create to improve life and to teach. Creative ideas and creating are the essence of life."
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"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
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"He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read."
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"Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author."
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"After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom."
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"Ideas stand in the corner and laugh while we fight over them."
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"And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence."
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"Become a thought leader by taking an idea, belief, or process and turning it inside-out and upside-down. Bust beyond the box and shatter a few ceilings to go where no one has gone before. Make your mark by becoming a pioneer in your pursuits."
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"For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that's taking something that potentially should be celebrated-a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way-that's taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist."
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"Publishing is definitely something you do because you enjoy educating or entertaining people."
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"Throw away the servility of imitation, and rise to the manliness of originality."
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"Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"
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"A good dose of fantasy is exercise for your sensibilities, it keeps your avatar strong."
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"Writing is like life: it goes on."
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"No matter how hard they try, they'll never create anything so perfectly beautiful as what plays out in my own imagination."
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"Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?"
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"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door."
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"I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape."
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"Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process."
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"Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege."
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"Begin to read, write, sing, dance, study, draw!"
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"People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place."
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"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
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"Creativity is a high level of thinking and intelligence."
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"I'm very easily distracted unless I have music on. Listening to music while I brainstorm makes me think of scenes that would fit the mood of the music I'm playing."
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"Think outside the box? Indeed. But to add balance to that, one should not in the process forget what the inside of the box looks like as well. Those who are best at thinking outside the box do it not to puff themselves up, but to see how small they really are. As a contented fish in its fish tank appears to have a small, boring existence to us, imagine a larger, more perceptive kingdom (even by scientific taxonomy) to whom our contented existences may appear to be small and boring. This is where true creativity and massive perceptive abilities spawn a sense of intellectual humility; the kind which God adores."
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"I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country."
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"The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem."
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"Don't make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won't - and if they don't notice, I know it's frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn't change anything - because your responsibility is not to the people you're making the gift for, but to the gift itself."
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"I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like."
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"There's plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home, but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still-your suggestions will never be followed. You're allowed to have a seat, and you're allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote."
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"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes."
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"Creativity is key to productivity and prosperity."
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"It might have been done before, but it hasn't been done by you!"
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"Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together."
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"Had we not decided to perform this as gracefully as a dancer's leap? But we turned it into a dinosaur's dance party!"
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"I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don't know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had a shutting-off feeling that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK ."
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"Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself."
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"Briar stood, pushing up her sleeves. 'It's about to get all nonfiction in here'."
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"Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head."
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"Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! À bas l'originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."
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"Art doesn't bare itself to just anyone, but to believers called artists."
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"When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages."
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"How I look to you is the reflection of how you look at me."
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"How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process."
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"The 'Muse' is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake."
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"Writers are the ink of society."
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"Paradise of Lailah Gifty Akita is reading, wondering and writing."
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