Quotes About Creativity

There are songs, Waits says, that simply will not allow themselves to be born, and that will hold up the recording of an entire album.

Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page. His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out "like little origami things, or paper airplanes.

But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn't actually that big a deal. He told me, "I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds." Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That's all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.

inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.

Intracranial jewelry-making! What a cool job! That's basically what we all do--all of us who spend our days making and doing interesting things for no particularly rational reason.

The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature.

O trabalho quer ser feito, e quer ser feito através de você.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life. The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.

I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result.

there is a profound sense of honor to be found in looking after yourself, and that honor will resonate powerfully in your work; it will make your work stronger.

how I choose to handle myself as a writer is entirely my own choice. I can make my creativity into a killing field, or I can make it into a really interesting cabinet of curiosities. I can even make it into an act of prayer. My ultimate choice, then, is to always approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness.

There are many reasons why women's voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it's also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place. Holding back their ideas, holding back their contributions, holding back their leadership and their talents.

But I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things for as long as we live, and because I enjoy making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. The

she admitted that perhaps she wanted to be a writer. He smiled at the girl with infinite compassion and asked, "Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage to bring forth this work? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying

they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.

Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.

It is well worth seeing City of Girls, if only to enjoy Edna Parker Watson's costumes—which are delectable, from stem to stern.

Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don't. Please don't try to help me.

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living. The

I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me. Even when I couldn't do it right, it was still interesting to me. It still interests me. Nothing has ever interested me more. That profound sense of interest kept me working