Selected creativity quotes

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

2. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

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

4. Happiness... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

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

6. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

7. 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.

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

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

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

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. Man is a genius when he is dreaming.

14. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

15. 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.

16. There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

20. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

21. 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.

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

23. 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.

24. 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.

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

26. 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.

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

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

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

30. You can never discard too many bad ideas.

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

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

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

34. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

40. Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.

41. I take pride as the king of illiterature.

42. I think one of the reasons so many people connected to him is they could tell his music was really pure and instinctual.

43. [If he] applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, its reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either.

44. And so I parallel the brains of Cobain.

45. 'If the listener does eventually come to the point where he makes the ultimate performance by splicing tapes from other musicians' recordings, he will eventually become just as bored with it as with other recordings, for it will still always be the same. Look, for instance, at electronic music. The boys are already becoming bored with what they do because they put it irrevocably on tape. The best indication of this is that more and more they are mixing the live performance element with their tapes.' Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

46. One of the temptations of an artist is to believe himself solitary ...But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank

47. ...Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal; refine thy rapture! If thou drink, drink by the eight and ninety rules of art: if thou love, exceed by delicacy; and if thou do aught joyous, let there be subtlety therein!

48. One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today's ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public. Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God's heaven; then, however, his responsbility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence - in destitution, in prison, in sickness - his sense of stable harmony never deserts him. But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings - they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist's vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.

49. for when women take revenge, it is with all their hearts and souls, not to mention considerable inventiveness and ingenuity

50. The concept for this video was to capture just how dynamic my beard and hair are.'*

51. To serve the people, one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader. And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine, One must deeply imagine

52. 'Here's a song I made up while I was watching Xena the Warrior Princess with the sound off. It's a fact. I had a secret crush on Xena. It was a secret to me too. I wouldn't admit it. She's pretty fuckin' tough. She has a good yell... she kills the stupid gladiators with the log-trap. Release the log-trap! She releases the log-trap and they all get... crushed. They'd all wanna be with her if they could, but unfortunately they're not on her side. It's a lot better with the sound off. Really, it is. And the song didn't have anything to do with Xena... but... I was about half a bottle through Jameson's... if that makes any sense.'

53. 'Lesson #1 is that rock music is in the fighting spirit, not in the amperage of the guitars; indeed, some of the toughest rocking has come from all, or mostly acoustic bands; Elvis presented a primer lesson from the famous Sun sessions, with a simple blues song through the most famous faux false start in rock history; he and the boys start out all slow and bluesy, before stopping the band cold and calling it out like the hippest beat poet: 'Hold it fellas. That don't... move me. Let's get real, real gone for a change'. Then they did, let it loose, turned every bit of intensity in their beings into a jumping arrangement, much faster and more rhythmically nuanced a performance than the opening. Much of the intensity is in the fast and furious, but precisely laid out detail work; there is a strong sense of spontaneity and discovery, but what ultimately makes this a hall-of-fame performance is the vocal performance; Elvis doing tricks, making sudden octave wide jumps. 'If you see my milkcow...' There is a charismatic determination of spirit that Nietzsche would no doubt have recognized as the will to power; when the King got through with it, it was no longer anything to do with a high calcium drink, but about the singer's assertion of his place in the universe'

54. ' Steve Sholes, who produced the session, said, 'Roll the tape.' And I said, 'But I haven't heard the song yet!' And he said, 'Roll the tape, Bill!' and I look and the studio is totally black out there. I can't see a thing. I said, 'You're kidding!' He said, 'No, roll the tape!'. So, I roll the tape and I don't know what's going to happen. And a guitar starts off, and then a bass comes in, and Elvis starts singing. And I still can't see a thing in the studio. And I'm afraid to turn any mikes off because somebody may come in and start playing. All of a sudden, Elvis stops singing and just starts talking. And I say to myself, 'This is awful!' because you don't normally put a lot of echo on dialogue. And I thought, next take I'll just turn it down, so we just did the take all the way through. If you listen to the dialogue, the echo matches the effect, because he says, 'And the stage is bare, and I'm standing there:'. Later, I said, 'How about that echo?'. Sholes said, 'Screw the echo, that's a hit!'. And it was done in one take...'

55. I have had to do most of my choreography. I would say most of it, with help from various choreographers I have worked with

56. A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything

57. Emilio and I like projects to breathe and grow. We started with a concept -- write songs, make demos, then let the guest stars listen to them and then afffect the writing process. For Jose Feliciano, I had written a chorus and a bit of a melody. He started playing the chorus and ad-libbing. I went, 'This is the [stuff]! Forget my melody!' Carlos Santana worked just the other way. He wanted me to record a plished take singing first, so his playing could recreate my emotion. I got goose bumps [writing '90 Millas']. Like in 'Esperando,' which is addressed to Cubans on the island. Those of us in America, we're like the bogeyman, but I wanted Cubans at home to know: Whatever happened doesn't matter. The future is for us to heal. Adn also: because we're here, we latched onto any part of our culture. Yes and no [this is a political record]. Politics is life, so yes. but it's not specific. Saying that 90 miles haven't divided us sends a message about freedom for Cuba -- and for everyone.

58. A notable scheme has occurred to me. - Orlo

59. We were taught to explore our creative options rather than focus on the obstacles

60. Writing not long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art. And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this doubting phrase 'Could we recapture the zest of that old time?' I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so - the rest is silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged muteness which is the lot of advancing years. Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its ever-new and unique quality - perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.

61. Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy,

62. I think yet again of my father, who struggled to become a painter after he was forced into early and unwelcome retirement by the Great Depression. He has reason to be optimistic about his new career, since the early stages of his pictures, whether still or portraits or landscapes, were full of pow. Mother, meaning to be helpful, would say of each one: 'That's really wonderful, Kurt. Now all you have to do is finish it.' He would then ruin it. I remember a portrait he did of his only brother, Alex, who was an insurance salesman, which he called 'Special Agent'. When he roughed it in, his hand and eye conspired with a few bold strokes to capture several important truths about Alex, including a hint of disappointment. Uncle Alex was a proud graduate of Harvard, who would rather have been a scholar of literature than an insurance man. When Father finished the portrait, made sure every square inch of masonite had its share of paint, Uncle Alex had disappeared entirely. We had a drunk and lustful Queen Victoria instead. This was terrible.

63. /* And you'll never guess what the dog had */ /* in its mouth... */

64. Sage's light Oh and Edison He made two sparks ignite All you do It's a scientific chain reaction

65. Jane took me to another level because she's truly a wonderful writer. I'd put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. ... I was doing my Edith Ann album in '71 - the album came out in '72. She'd done a thing on television called J.T. - it was about a kid in Harlem - and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she'd ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time - and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, 'Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue.' So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn't hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away.

66. : if my ideology is a hand, then that's just two fingers. I incorporate a lot of Christian morality into what I do and in fact a lot of my beliefs are very conservative - like my desire for the world to be a better place where people use more intelligence. If you had to condense all that I believe in, it's that responsible, intelligent people should be allowed to do what they want. That artists and performers and architects, people who contribute something to the world, that actually have something to say as opposed to a business man or a politician, say, people who actually contribute to society, the power should be traded. The creators are always suppressed - other than the placebo 'fame' that they're always given. I don't really suggest any solution - that we could all kick them out of their positions of power and take over. It's just the idea that if you enjoy what you do, that's why you should do it.

67. I love manikins. I want to bring them to life. I give mine names. I feel as if I know them. I'll often talk to them in my living room. ~Rolling Stone 1983

68. A guy told me he liked cherries...but... I waited to see if he was gonna say tomato...before i realized he likes cherries just...alright, that joke is ridiculous. That's like a carbon copy of the previous joke but with different ingredients. I don't know what i was trying to pull off there.

69. I wanted to sing other types of songs that Simon and Garfunkel wouldn't do. 'Mother and Child Reunion' for example, is not a song that you would have normally thought that Simon and Garfunkel would have done. It's possible that they might have. But it wouldn't have been the same, and I don't know if I would have been so inclined in that direction. So for me it was a chance to break out and gamble a little bit ... The breakup had to do with a natural drifting apart as we got older and the separate lives that were more individual. We weren't so consumed with recording and performing. We had other activities ... there was no great pressure to stay together other than money, which exerted very little influence upon us. ... We didn't need the money.

70. He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness... He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them. ~ Clive James

71. You have to be creative to do science. Otherwise you're just repeating tired formulas

72. I died and came back/I hustle with these lyrics as if it's a game of crack

73. Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

74. To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.

75. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

76. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

77. When this old world gets me down and there's no love to be found I close my eyes and soon I find I'm in a playground in my mind Where the children laugh and the children play And we sing a song all day.

78. ... the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution ...

79. Be lazy, go crazy.

80. I like it. It's genius!

81. Don't feel like home. He's a little out And all this words elope. There's nothing like your poem A scratching voice all alone. There's nothing like your baritone It's nothing as it seems. The little that he needs. It's home The little that he sees is nothing he concedes. It's home

82. He needs a quiet room With a lock to keep him in It's just a quiet room And he's there He plays an old guitar With a coin found by the phone It was his friends guitar That he played He's never been in love But he knows just what love is He says nevermind And no-one speaks

83. A daily dose of eMpTyV Will flush your mind right down the drain Shannon Hoon and Kurt Cobain, Make yourself a household name

84. 'My brain is hung like a horse!'

85. 'I was never bound to what was already done, was already experimented'

86. It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.

87. A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within the latter people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favor of their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative.

88. His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

89. I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, 'Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?' Tracy replied, 'What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?' You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.

90. When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

91. You speak of Lord Byron and me - there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees - I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

92. I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.

93. Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.

94. If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

95. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

96. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

97. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

98. I am interested in entertaining people, in bringing pleasure, particularly laughter, to others, rather than being concerned with 'expressing' myself with obscure creative impressions.

99. In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.

100. A imaginacao foi a companheira de toda a minha existencia, viva, rapida, inquieta, alguma vez timida e amiga de empacar, as mais delas capaz de engolir campanhas e campanhas, correndo.