Quotes About Creativity

Malraux invented the term and concept of the "museum without walls," which sees modern art as developing, not from previous Western traditions alone, but from African, Hindu, Chinese and various other Third World traditions also. I consider him the godfather of multi-culturalism.

In fact, the emphasis on choice and creativity in existentialist-humanist psychology has an exact parallel in the two-hole experiment. Many physicists think the best metaphor to describe that experiment is to say that we create the wave or particle depending on which experimental set-up we choose.

No matter," said Pablo with the dignity of a great magician. "I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.

Ezra Pound had the peculiar distinction of winning an award from the Library of Congress for writing the best poem of the year, in 1948, while government psychiatrists insisted he was insane.)

O ceticismo em um grau elevado é um lugar estimulante para ser visitado (por um romancista), mas certamente não desejo viver lá.

Then I began to discover something about synchronicity and the imagination. Some of the most absurd things that we invented turned out to be true, and that really blew my mind.

Norbert Weiner once simplified the meaning of this equation by saying that great poetry contains more information than political speeches. You never know what will come next in a truly creative poem, but in a George Bush speech you not only know what will come next, you probably could predict the whole speech, in general, before he even opens his mouth.

Beethoven's music, I think, is often like that. Just when you think you recognize the pattern in his creative acts, he surprises you by a variation. Is that, maybe, why we sometimes feel such music is closer to experienced reality than any theory we can devise?

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth. Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it. Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

I suddenly remembered that Adolph Hitler once said that anybody who paints the sky green should be sterilized at once. I thought I understood the Right Man more deeply. The Right Man stays in one reality-tunnel because wandering into the reality-labyrinth of the creative mind terrifies him.

Magick provides a powerful context and support system for even the darkest or most fucked-up times and experiences. Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter, every boy and girl should familiarize themselves with the disciplines of magic even if only for shits and giggles. It's also engaging and absorbing and creative to make spells and do rituals and to form rewarding relationships with things that shouldn't exist.

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

As I sat on death row, reading his work created a doorway that allowed me to walk out of my cell and into a universe of infinite wonder. He taught me how to begin creating my own world, and how to leave behind the mundane and mediocre drudgery that seemed to swallow most people whole.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the poor hungry wretches that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

The brain never remembers like a tape recorder or repeats like a parrot. Even the most rigid and compulsive types (Catholics, Marxists, members of CSICOP, etc.) do a lot more re-associating, re-framing and creative editing than they consciously realize.

It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons, have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted. They exhibit, at times at least, what looks like growth or creativity, although it is possible for Fundamentalist Materialists to insist that this "is really random behavior or behavior whose determinants had not yet been understood.

Leaving aside these experiences or hallucinations of creativity and growth or self-criticism and self-overcoming — we shall return to them — it appears that most of what I have been calling Idolatry and Fundamentalism can be biologically described as normal primate behavior — mechanical imprinting and conditioning combined with normal territorial pugnacity.

The "soul" or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the "creative Void" of the Taoists.

The only sensible goal, then, is to try to build a reality-tunnel for next week that is bigger, funnier, sexier, more optimistic and generally less boring than any previous reality-tunnel.

Like marijuana, a Wellesian long shot creates an information overload and provokes you to enlarge your reality-tunnel to accommodate it.

And once you have built that bigger, funnier, happier universe of thought, build a bigger and better one, for next month.

Everybody you meet is an "artist" who has made a similar creation.