Quotes About Creativity

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

Neelay, please

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

It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

In a matter of months, the Canadian physician developed a distinctive process for making illuminating gas from bitumen with coal oil as an intermediary. When he applied for a Nova Scotia patent on his process in June 1849, he used the patent to protect his products' brand names as well, calling them kerosene and kerosene gas (from keros, Greek for "wax," and -ene to associate the new products with familiar camphene).

One of Szilard's sidelines, then and later, was invention. Between 1924 and 1934 he applied to the German patent office individually or jointly with his partner Albert Einstein for twenty-nine patents.

In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from "normal" positions, and taking risks by departing from reality.

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation.

Good art seems absolutely essential to healthy religion.

Great saints are both courageous and creative; they are "yes, and" or non-dual thinkers who never get trapped in the small world of "either-or" except in the ways of love and courage, where they are indeed all or nothing.

I hear you don't write any more, he says... Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers. Not the same as writing a book though, right? Almost identical, I assure him. Both go largely unread.

My favorite teacher in college advised me not to write a book until it was impossible not to.

imagination without energy remains inert...

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.