Quotes About Creativity

If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I'll have to write another book.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

But I warn you, I am only really myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

There are two principles for creative success -- one general and one definitive. The general principle is that everyone has the ability to be creative and make a big difference in this world. The definitive principle is that almost everyone has volunteered to be exempt from the general principle.

Anything great that has been accomplished in the history of humanity has started with one small thought. We all have those thoughts; few people do anything with theirs, however. What do you intend to do with yours?

You can always make up in creativity what you lack in good fortune. Playing the game of life is like playing poker. Playing three aces badly won't get you as far as playing a terrible hand well.

My goal as a writer is to move people, to make them laugh and cry, and I'm gratified when I succeed. But I didn't invent the humor in recovery. It's already there. There's a tremendous amount of laughter at a good AA meeting.

I work best without distractions. Do Not Disturb signs are made for someone like me. I'm baffled by writers who prefer to write in Starbucks.

Getting my poems published was a great achievement, but it didn't pay the rent. The only time I made any money was when I won a CAPS fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1983. They gathered sixteen poets in a room and handed us each a check for $5,000. The room was filled with happiness so thick you could cut it. Eventually, I started looking around for another way to make a living.

Painting has to do with knocking yourself out day after day trying to get what you want to down on canvas. Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but every day you try. That's what painting is.

It's not what you've got, it's what you use that makes a difference.

Live creatively, friends. . . . Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don't be impressed with yourself. Don't compare yourself with others" (Galatians 6:1, 4).

I think my type of personality has all music inside of it, so I am full of music, without even knowing it, without even learning it, without even hearing it.

I left Jamaica for a while, because as an artist I need to experience different things, see the world, have different energies. Living in one place is not good for me.

I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat Bob Marley got heat Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.

The music I do is food... that will be your dinner.

I get lots of ideas when the lights go out at night and it gets very quiet. Sometimes they come when I first lie down to sleep; other times I wake up with an idea racing through my mind. But regardless of when an idea comes, I have made it a habit to get out of bed and write the idea down before it disappears into my dreams. You should do the same.

Know all the Questions, but not the Answers Look for the Different, instead of the Same Never Walk where there's room for Running Don't do anything that can't be a Game

None of my friends know how to play imagining games the way you do," Melanie said. "Some of them can do it a little bit but they mostly don't have any very good ideas. And a lot of them only like ball games or other things that are already made up. But I like imagining games better than anything.

But they're not really paper dolls," Melanie said. "And I don't really play with them, not like moving them around and dressing them up and everything. They're just sort of a record of a game I play. I make up a family and then I find people who look like them in magazines and catalogues, just so I'll remember them better.

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

Working in Hollywood, it's clear the more money you have, the more technology you can get. So you can build a whole Japanese set. Only in Hollywood!

A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!"