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. Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet. (Source: The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler, London, 1970, p. 253)

42. 'Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.' (Source: The Act of Creation)

43. 'Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.'

44. 'The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.'

45. 'True creativity often starts where language ends.'

46. The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

47. Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine. It isn't money, for genius seldom gets any. It isn't fame: fame is too uncertain and, more closely considered, of too little worth. Nor is it strictly for its own pleasure, for the great exertion involved almost outweighs the pleasure. It is rather an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.

48. A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument - a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself - in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

49. Talent hits a target no-one else can hit; genius hits targets no-one else can see.

50. When I met Jorge Luis Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer, he became excited and started talked volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, which they often had, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done by Schopenhauer.'

51. There once was a brainy baboon, Who always breathed down a bassoon, For he said, 'It appears That in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune'.

52. What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves.... He must have the passion of a lover.

53. Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

54. Genius, when young, is divine.

55. Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius.

56. Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.

57. When I want to read a novel, I write one.

58. Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

59. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

60. You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years : rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.

61. We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.

62. Have you seen what they're doing to movies now? They show the movie to a test audience, then change it depending on whether these 200 random yahoos liked it or did not like it, as though we are all one, as though we all have the same taste, as though, as though, as though.

63. Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative.

64. Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.

65. When workers fall back on violence, they are lost. Oh, they might win some of their demands and might end a strike a little earlier, but they give up their imagination, their creativity, their will to work hard and to suffer for what they believe is right.

66. His formidable originality within the picture-book convention may not have been altogether apparent to Keeping himself, which is both a strength and a weakness: the strength that he could communicate with unrivalled emotional intensity - but possibly only with one child in twenty; the concomitant weakness is that there was not a lot he could do to broaden this minority appeal and ensure that his books remained in print over longer periods. ~ Douglas Martin in Charles Keeping: an illustrator's life (1993)

67. And me I'm in my bedroom drawing in my notebook Because my hand thinks I'm an artist But my heart knows I'm a poet It's just words they mean so little to me.

68. If you stay to long Inside my memory I will trap you in a song Tied to a melody And I'll keep you there so You can't bother me.

69. There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero).

70. Praying is another way of singing. You plant in the tree the soul of lemons. You plant in the gardens the spirit of roses.

71. Oh! We already, we done already done it, done it, dammit! I could you know, like, sing a thing, and then not sing it for a little while, and then sing it again... and people would be like, 'Why'd he sing that again?'

72. There's often a lot of stupid ideas like 'you all dress as fruits and pretend you're selling underpants' or 'we'll put you on a bed of nails and drive a truck over the top and photograph you' for the cover.

73. 'That's the magic of this band: shooting from the hip. The lights have to follow our cues, because we're not going to follow their cues. We're not going to stick to a song the way it's supposed to be. Everything is up to us. That's music to me. That's American music. We're an American band.' -- Dave Matthews, Rolling Stone interview 'The Boys of Summer' (June 16, 2005). Eliscu, Jenny (2005). 'The Boys of Summer' Rolling Stone (accessed June 19. 2006)

74. Filmmmaking encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelivably deceitful, and everything in between.

75. Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

76. Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. I never tried my hand at that sort of writing but on this particular occasion such was my state of feeling, that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took pen in hand, and as usual I went ahead.

77. Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity. That's why meetings become toxic - they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.

78. Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life's routines. It's the trade-off so that we don't have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we'd at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn't matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.

79. You make 'em, I amuse 'em.

80. Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.

81. And that is a story that no one can beat, When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

82. Playing 'Bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

83. Roaming through the jungle of 'oohs' and 'ahs,' searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

84. I don't pursue anything. The only thing I always answer is my own impulse.

85. I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

86. My biggest kick in music-playing or writing-is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?

87. There's 200,000 gods in Hinduism... and they've got gods like Shiva, the God of Creation and Destruction. Which is a good god to be, 'cause you can go *WHOOM* (creates thing) 'What do you think? Do you like that? You don't like that?' *WHOOM* (destroys thing) If you're just the God of Creation, you're going *WHOOM* 'Do you like that? You don't? All right, I'll put it in the garage... shit, I haven't got a garage! *WHOOM* (creates garage)

88. Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse, And every conqueror creates a muse.

89. He could not be captured, He could not be bought, His running was rhythm, His standing was thought; With one eye on sorrow And one eye on mirth, He galloped in heaven And gambolled on earth And only the poet With wings to his brain Can mount him and ride him Without any rein, The stallion of heaven, The steed of the skies, The horse of the singer Who sings as he flies.

90. An author is known by the worlds he creates. The measure of his greatness is the degree of clarity and the consistency with which he builds his spirit's habitation, the depth and height it offers the reader who enters it. Eleanor Farjeon's world is construed of fantasy, romance, and an abounding yea-saying joy in the experience of life. It is the stuff that dreams are made of, and as dangerous as dynamite except for those who have genius in their blood, a compassionate heart, a sense of wonder at the multitudinous miracles to be met in one day's living in this world, and the blessed proportion of wit, humor and nonsense. All these she has.

91. To have ownership of something that powerful is something I'll never be able to get used to. It still knocks me out when I play it.

92. I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.

93. I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said.

94. Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

95. When I write, I solemnly visit myself.

96. It's our insides that make us who we are, that allow us to dream and wonder and feel for others. That's what's essential. That's what will always make the biggest difference in our world.

97. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

98. There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an 'overjoyed hero,' counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.

99. Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.

100. Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.