Quotes About Inspiration

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you'll find out how big a prize you've won.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.

Remember this when you're struggling for a big idea. You're much better off scratching for a small one.

Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It's a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won't know how to harness the power of that kiss.

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.

The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.

I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they're paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.

I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.

As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, "People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they've started work on a project-- say, a book-- but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it's going, they tell you that they're still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it's never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.

When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.

We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us.

The real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces "SDG," for Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone the glory. By

get busy copying... travelling the paths of greatness, even in someone else's footprints, is a vital means of acquiring a skill.

Art is a vast democracy of habit.

Design can change how you look at yourself.

There are some people who, when they speak, no matter what the topic, seem to draw you into their own worldview, almost like an act of magic, like you are stepping into a movie, TV show, computer game, or graphic novel of their making. This can be a sign of their energy and creativity.

We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly. In referring to the creative spark, we mean people who generate new ideas, start new institutions, develop new methods for executing on known products, lead intellectual or charitable movements, or inspire others by their very presence, leadership, and charisma, regardless of the context.

Daniel understands that the mystique and thrill of building a new company have to outweigh the inertia of the status quo and its easier defaults, and that he is in part responsible for articulating that vision of creating something new.

Karlheinz Stockhausen.