Quotes About Creativity

feel sometimes like my genius sits in the corner and watches me at my desk, day after day, week after week, month after month, just to be sure I really mean it, just to be sure I'm really giving this creative endeavor my wholehearted effort.

But why must everything always have a practical application?

How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren't going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.

because creativity is mystical doesn't mean it shouldn't also be demystified—especially if it means liberating artists from the confines of their own grandiosity, panic, and ego.

Because this is the other side of the contract with creativity: If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.

Lo que no quiere decir que vivir creativamente sea siempre fácil; solo que siempre es posible.

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves.

Wendell Berry warned, "To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain.

I'm with the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on this point, when he observes: "If the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having.

He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn't so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

Sometimes I think that the difference between a tormented creative life and a tranquil creative life is nothing more than the difference between the word awful and the word interesting. Interesting outcomes, after all, are just awful outcomes with the volume of drama turned way down.

There is no time or space where inspiration comes from—and also no competition, no ego, no limitations. There is only the stubbornness of the idea itself, refusing to stop searching until it has found an equally stubborn collaborator. (Or multiple collaborators, as the case may be.) Work with that stubbornness. Work with it as openly and trustingly and diligently as you can.

My desire to work—my desire to engage with my creativity as intimately and as freely as possible—is my strongest personal incentive to fight back against pain, by any means necessary, and to fashion a life for myself that is as sane and healthy and stable as it can possibly be.

Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?

I am going to spend as much time as I can creating delightful things out of my existence, because that's what brings me awake and that's what brings me alive.

I wish somebody had told them all to go fill up a bunch of pages with blah-blah-blah and just publish it, for heaven's sake, and ignore the outcome.

What I'm saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for another such unadulterated and impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don't sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me—waiting to see if I'm truly serious about this line of work.

Chop up that failure and use it for bait to try to catch another project.

The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living.

inspiration comes from another world, you see, and it speaks a language entirely unlike my own, so sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying.

Your creativity is way older than you are, way older than any of us. Your very body and your very being are perfectly designed to live in collaboration with inspiration, and inspiration is still trying to find a way to you - the same way it hunted down your ancestors.

The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too. That's the deal. I trust it; it trusts me.