Quotes About Creativity

With this first letter I sent fourteen watercolors, including Nostalgia of the Orient, Glorious Sunset at Sea, Distressed Stars on Earth, Deep Sorrow, Kingdom of Ferns, Abandoned Heart, and Rye and Rainbow.

What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

already she drew in the sand with her big toe: King Solomon, as though he were a rubber ball, an apocalyptic, bearded herring, an imperial walking-stick, an amalgam, half chicken and half Solomon.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

I told you, we must cut out imagination. In everyone...Extirpate imagination. Nothing but surgery, nothing but surgery will do!

How do you know nonsense isn't a good thing? if human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily previous could have come from it.

Shutting my eyes, I dreamed in formulas.

The phono-lecturer began the description of the recently invented musicometer. "… By merely rotating this handle anyone is enabled to produce about three sonatas per hour. What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. ("Letter To Stalin")

Ime te bolesti je: Mašta. To je -- crv, koji grize crne bore na ?elu. To je groznica koja vas tjera da tr?ite sve dalje -- iako to 'dalje' po?inje tamo gdje završava sre?a. To je -- posljednja barikada na putu prema sre?i. Radujte se: ona je ve? raznesena. Put je slobodan.

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex. Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex.

Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children. And that's just it—we must always think like children with their what-happens-nexts.

What difficulties our predecessors had in making music! They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.

It is not your fault; you are ill. And the name of your illness is: FANCY.

What makes you think that nonsense is bad? If they'd nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.

To be original means to distinguish yourself from others. It follows that to be original is to violate the principle of equality.

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.