1,519 Creativity Quotes

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

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

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

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.

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I've always believed in experiencing everything in life. When you walk out with blinders on, you cut yourself off from the angels and the fairies.

Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.

My mind contains many good ideas, but it's not always easy to squeeze one out.

I march to a different drummer, whose location, identity, and musical training haven't yet been established.

You can never discard too many bad ideas.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is sexton to all the world.

I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths and skies and seas around, And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

Thoreau believed that one of the arts of life was to make the most of it. He loved the multum in parvo, or pot-luck; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he was in the habit of saying, - Give me healthy senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. But this should have availed him little, if he had not been at the same time copiously endowed with the power of recording what he imbibed. His senses truly lived twice.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.

To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.

Every artist dips his brush into his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

By thee do seers the inward light discern; By thee the statue lives, the Gods return.

It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them.

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.

'One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.'

'What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.'

'Good composers don't borrow, they steal'

By always thinking unto them. ... I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddam 'unskilled laughter' coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right - God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

Franny has the measles, for one thing. Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the lightbulbs.

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

The man who dreams of artistry, and yet thinks it is necessary for someone else to lick him into shape, is a man whose art is doomed to mediocrity. If you're going to deliver the real goods, you've got to do your own licking into shape. Buck up ! Kick in ! Get onto yourself ! Don't squeal ! Don't tell me, or any other man how good you consider anything you've done, and that you think it is as good as somebody else's. Make your work so damned well better that you won't have time or thought to compare it with another man's mediocrity.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

Something in me knows where I'm going, and - well, painting is a state of being.

My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

Hasten slowly. Run faster than beauty.

Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.

Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.

Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.

Film will only become art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else - and failing.

Music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.

I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.

In der Kunst ist das Beste gut genug.

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is the intermixing of different genres.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt Der in den Zweigen wohnet.

All Nine often used to come to me, I mean the Muses: But I ignored them: my girl was in my arms. Now I've left my sweetheart: and they've left me, And I roll my eyes, seeking a knife or rope. But Heaven is full of gods: You came to aid me: Greetings, Boredom, mother of the Muse.

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.

Alles Gescheite ist schon gedacht worden. Man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken.

What wise or stupid thing can man conceive That was not thought of in ages long ago?

Individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

In art the best is good enough.

The best genius is that which absorbs and assimilates everything without doing the least violence to its fundamental destiny - that which we call character - but rather improving it and enhancing it as far as possible.