Quotes About Creativity

But the difficulty of changing a typescript can also have what seems to be the opposite effect: You let go. You stop caring about certainty; you stop editing yourself, stop second-guessing yourself, and simply write—mistakes and all.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.

We are made for art . . . The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Reckless archaism. Arpeggiating under the influence. Presto in an andante zone.

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets—tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

Isn't the point of music to move listeners? Mattison smiled. No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits. And tradition? Real composers make their own.

Art is not a mobocracy. It's a republic.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

The loneliness of writing is that you baffle your friends and change the lives of strangers.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear.

Do not invent anything; simply discover it.

Culture) Some part of us could model some other modeler. and out of that simple loop came all the love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts.

They can't believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one

They form in front of him: his friend, his wife, his daughter. People who loved him, who believed he'd do good things. In the mild April mist, he thinks: All I ever wanted was to make one slight noise that might delight you all. How small a thought it took. How small a thought.

How life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery

Whole new rooms open up in Adam's brain, ready to be furnished.

Independent thought—a power of attraction all its own.

Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

A simple, five-command loop expands into a beautiful segmented structure of fifty lines. Little portions of program detach into reusable parts. Neelay's father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.