Selected creation quotes

1. A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.

2. If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

3. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

4. Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

5. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas.

6. The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

7. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

8. About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

9. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

10. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

11. No matter how substandard you feel your skill or talent may be, If you never produce your art, the world will always remain deprived of it.

12. The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my art is better than your art, at being what it is.

13. It takes three to make a child.

14. A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

15. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

16. In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.

17. God created man, but I could do better.

18. Space is the breath of art.

19. Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

20. There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

21. Everyone should be able to build, and as long as this freedom to build does not exist, the present-day planned architecture cannot be considered art at all.

22. The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally.

23. The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

24. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.

25. Nature is none other than God in things... Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; Whence all of God is in all things... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.

26. To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

27. The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

28. Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

29. There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

30. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

31. God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.

32. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

33. All that you accomplish or fail to accomplish with your life is the direct result of your thoughts.

34. The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

35. So God stepped over to the edge of the world And He spat out the seven seas; He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed; He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled; And the waters above the earth came down, The cooling waters came down.

36. With his head in his hands, God thought and thought, Till he thought: I'll make me a man!

37. This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image.

38. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

39. When I want to play music, you've got to get me on tape or else it goes.

40. There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

41. Art for art's sake has never flourished in England. We are often called inartistic because our art is unconscious. Our drama and poetry, like our laws and our constitution, have evolved by accident while we thought we were doing something else, and so it will be with music. The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community - if we seek for art we shall not find it.

42. I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

43. Music has been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to leave my mark, leave something musically good behind.

44. Human existence is obviously distinguished from animal life by its qualified participation in creation. Within limits it breaks the forms of nature and creates new configurations of vitality. Its transcendence over natural process offers it the opportunity of interfering with the established forms and unities of vitality as nature knows them.

45. Time is never a problem on the God level. Or space. Whatever needed to deceive you was provided. But no more than that. That is the conservative principle in art at the God level. While I can't do it, not being at that level, I have seen a lot of it done. A skillful Artist in shapes and appearances does no more than necessary to create His effect.

46. Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation.

47. God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

48. If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents.

49. Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men.

50. An honest God is the noblest work of man.

51. I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.

52. In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.

53. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things...

54. And oft-times cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade, And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made; And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid.

55. Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

56. I co-wrote all the songs on my album, and co-produced a lot of them as well, So being involved in the creative aspect and not just singing is so important to me because, above everything, I love to create and I love to express myself.

57. No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

58. The role of the writer is not simply to arrange Being according to his own lights; he must also serve as a medium to Being and remain open to its often unfathomable dictates. This is the only way the work can transcend its creator and radiate its meaning further than the author himself can see or perceive.

59. Vous creez un frisson nouveau.

60. The artist after all is a solitary being.

61. Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.

62. What was evident was that Mozart was simply written down music already finished in his head. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty. ~ Peter Shaffer (spoken by Antonio Salieri in Shaffer's play Amadeus and slightly reworded in the movie adaptation of the play)

63. Men create the gods in their own image.

64. Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable - or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it. It is not a scene that has come alive, but a latent potentiality that has materialized. Suppose that one of the world's masterpieces were to disappear, leaving no trace behind it, not even a reproduction; even the completest knowledge of its maker's other works would not enable the next generation to visualize it. All the rest of Leonardo's oeuvre would not enable us to visualize the Mona Lisa; all Rembrandt's, the Three Crosses or The Prodigal Son; all Vermeer's, The Love Letter; all Titian's, the Venice Pieta; all medieval sculpture, the Chartres Kings or the Naumburg Uta. What would another picture by the Master of Villeneuve look like? How could even the most careful study of The Embarkation for Cythera, or indeed that of all Watteau's other works conjure up L'Enseigne de Gersaint, had it disappeared?