Quotes About Creativity

You must be able to create in the middle of things, or else you will not create. You must learn to take whatever practical and psychological actions are necessary to combat the anticreating forces that surround you and live within you.

People who think a lot are more prone to mania than people who do not think a lot. That intelligent, creative, and thoughtful people are the ones more regularly afflicted by mania is beyond question.

You do not want to avoid creating just because creating or the prospect of creating is making you anxious.

The only time I can get the thoughts to stop is when I get lost in something very creative and puzzle-like—and then I only get lost briefly. This way of life is exhausting

Writer's block comes from one's wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.

Rothko's paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous.

Some people, were born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people, dance.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines.

hard to create. One will very likely be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially

Then I remembered the Chip, a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought it's dumb not to use this for jumping. That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster

want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare. At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful

created specifically to separate the problem-solving tasks requiring access to a manufacturer's sticky solution information from those requiring access to users' sticky need information. The same basic principle can be illustrated in a less technical context: food design. In this field, manufacturer-based designers have traditionally undertaken the entire job of developing a novel food, and so they have freely blended need-specific design into any or all of the

technology-related information was associated in a significant

Eric von Hippel

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

But the fact is, she [the muse] won't be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her. She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She's a real bitch!

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.