Quotes About Creativity

The chances of achieving literary performance are, to the decimal point, the odds against becoming fully human. That means one hundred and fifty million to one. Which means one hundred and fifty million in one.

All Mrs. B's furniture was missing limbs or spines or cushions—bricks and broomsticks were busy being everything's crutch—but the room looked beautiful anyhow. Especially if you squinted some.

it's not what artists touch that counts most. It's what they don't touch.

What he missed was "the lack of great sounding boards like John, Ringo, George to actually talk to about the music.

The song Paul chose for this second session, 'Get on the Right Thing,' is built around McCartney's interesting use of a common-tone harmonic trick: the chords accompanying the song's verses all contain an E natural, but the melody McCartney sings against them steadily rises, creating a subtle tension harmonically, and between stasis and movement.

I was beginning to get too producery for everyone," Paul admitted. "George Martin was the actual producer, and I was beginning to be too definite, and George [Harrison] and Ringo turned around and said, 'Look, piss off, we're grown-ups and we can do it without you fine.' People like me who don't realize when they're being very overbearing, it comes as a great surprise to be told."30

What Paul did not know was that Laine was broke, and homeless, and sleeping in the back room of Secunda's office, and that he was trying to keep body and soul together with a Tin Pan Alley job, writing songs and recording demos at Essex Music in the hope that other artists would record them and earn him some royalties. He was writing a song when Paul telephoned.

The points are not the point; the point is poetry.

Points are not the point. The point is poetry.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Inspired first by the need to keep the cameramen awake, Emeril started yelling as he added ingredients to dishes—"Bam!

The Iron Chef America producers would reveal to all the competitors three possibilities for the secret ingredient twenty-four hours before contests were shot.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

So the poet, who wants to be something that he cannot be, and is a failure in plain life, makes up fictitious versions of his predicament that are interesting even to other persons because nobody is a perfect automobile salesman.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

My dream is to have a creativity barn, in my back yard, which is full of musical instruments and every kind of paint and oils and paper, and you can just go in and make something.

Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative...I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman.

Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in.