Quotes About Creativity

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards

Science fiction means different things to different people. When I make a word do a lot of work like that, said Humpty Dumpty, I always pay it extra—in which case the term science fiction has piled up a lot of expensive overtime.

A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic.

You know the classification of cultures into 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian.

There are only five things really worth drawing; four of them are pretty girls and the fifth is cats.

Robert A. Heinlein

A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.

Support for the arts—merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

Why it can't be done is not acceptable; I must discover how it can be done.

A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body.

Who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?

government-supported artist is an incompetent whore!

Abstract design is all right—for wallpaper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience.

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased—he hates all creative, people equally.

Robert A. Heinlein

The only alternative to torture is art" George Bernard Shaw. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative brutality.

William Blake said we should go to heaven for form and to hell for energy — and marry the two. When we can face our inner heaven and our inner hell, this is the highest form of creativity.

poetry is a special way of imagining the world or, to put this in more cognitive terms, a special mode of thinking with its own momentum and its own peculiar advantages.

I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute.

The parallels with my own experience are numerous – but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

I've learned a hell of a lot from [William S.] Burroughs. I think the best things in my books probably are inspired by Burroughs. I think about what Burroughs wrote and then I try to go one step further. And I may go one step back; I don't know.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) - Robert Anton Wilson

Van Gogh could see 28 shades of black. Why?