Quotes About Creativity

You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only . . . only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate TV?

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...

The power of any art is limited

The man who comes to writing late, but is in essence a writer, may sometimes gain as much as he has lost: his experience of life has given him a subject, he is spared the youthful writer's self-torment and soul-searching.

It is true that we are in charge of our imaginations, and by using them to imagine wonderful futures for ourselves, and by acting on that basis, it will follow, unerringly, that for us, it will be so.

That's the best way to feed the human mind. That's how Bob Marley did it. He never put it in your face. After you got the groove, you were just singing the hooks, because you thought it was cool.

Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage—that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.

We are against the glorification of "the People," as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.

There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man (if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on).

Lowndes was a colleague, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot.

Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art.

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

Jazz is democracy in music.

Because jazz musicians improvise under the pressure of time, what's inside comes out pure. It's like being pressed to answer a question before you have a chance to get your lie straight. The first thought is usually the truth.

You are creative, whoever you are. Respect your own creativity and respect the creativity and creative space of other people.

Music was just one of the tools we employed to create excitement. The jazzman's objective, however, was solely musical: Through his improvisation, he wanted to take people deep into his actual feelings and his world.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.