Quotes About Creativity

If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative.

Where people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good work.

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked.

Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.

I still do think fondly about my days in Edendale and Mixville — the little-known corners of the city limits where the movies actually were born. Tucked into the once barren hills just west of Downtown were the studios of Western hero Tom Mix and fledgling cartoonist Walt Disney. Behind razor wire near Glendale Boulevard lingered a small stone monument to Comedy. Why? Because the ancient Selig Company had once made movies there.

ROSCO: I haven't been happy with my part, Bunny. It's totally underwritten. Just listen to that last line, for instance! Who could do anything with "It's totally underwritten?" Where's the heart in a line like that? Where's the character?

And I have come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said that you don't make a photograph just with a camera but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.

Okay, Eliza. Now–you know–rise up! Think about those buffalos," Abby said. "Walking backward," added Ben. "Wearing diapers!" Ricky reminded her, giggling with glee. "I know how to do it!" Eliza snapped.

Greg Bear, Alan Dean Foster, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle.

only too frequently, our metaphors are not our own.

Perhaps all play is metaphor, perhaps all metaphor is play.

sheets, carefully taped together, forming a triptych

Northrop Frye said that a poet is a myth's way of making another myth.

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.

Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.

drove off. King and Goffin went home to Jersey. That night, after tucking their kids into bed, they sat down and wrote the music and the lyrics. By the next morning, they had a hit.

wildly speculative.

WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny," Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. "The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise." Yes

Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists.

Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. —MARCEL PROUST, Guermantes Way, Vol. I