Quotes About Creativity

Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.

Picasso sure had a thing for naked women. Why not draw them with their clothes on? Who sits around without a shirt on, plucking a mandolin? Why not draw naked guys, just to be fair? Naked women is art, naked guys a no-no, I bet. Probably because most painters are men.

Mr. Freeman says fear is a great place to begin art.

Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up.

That's the story I am dying to knit together, if I could only find the pattern.

He says we will graduate knowing how to read and write because we'll spend a million hours learning how to read and write. Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decided this? Does algebra move you to tears? (Hands raise, thinking he wants answers.) Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!!!

Don't be so hard on yourself. Art is about making mistakes and learning from them.

Picasso sure had a thing for naked women. Why not draw them with their clothes on? Who sits around without a shirt on, plucking a mandolin? Why not draw naked guys, just to be fair? Naked women is art, naked guys is a no-no, I bet. Probably because most painters are men.

Melinda, Mr. Freeman says. Snow filters into the car and melts on the dashboard. You're a good kid. I think you have a lot to say. I'd like to hear it. I close the door.

You were born with the seeds of your talent, the ability to observe the world around you and weave piece of it into a story. I believe that most—if not all—people are born with these seeds. What separates the writers from the non-writers is that the writers actually sit down and, you know… write.

I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.

I don't know anything. My trees suck.

I can't believe she gets paid for dreaming up crap like that.

SOUL, he writes on the board. The clay streaks the word like dried blood. This is where you can find your soul, if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you've never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.

HOW does a music lover transform into an actual music maker? What

To continue with the analogy, my perspective, my brush technique, my use of colour and shade, are all entirely different from his. The subject is essentially the same; it is the eyes and the hands of the artist that change.

Every so often, one encounters a woman of her type who reaches past the distractions of position, pleasure, and society's assumptions to become something greater. And even more rarely, one finds a woman who craves not power, but the chance to create something new.

And I won't deny your neighbors will take you more seriously if you tell them you've written a novel. (Of course if that's the main concern, just go and tell them. You don't have to write anything. Just lie a little. Don't worry—they won't beg to read the manuscript.)

While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called "Make A Prison." It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril's prestigious annual anthology. I was elated—but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.

Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don't tell stories. What they do is suggest—powerfully, irresistibly—that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He shows us a moment in time, arrayed on a canvas; there's clearly a past and a future, but it's our task to find it for ourselves.

They are properly described as works of fiction, with the understanding that fiction does not imply lack of truth so much as a willingness to refashion factuality in the service of drama, and perhaps in search of a higher truth.

Haiku's such a bore / Sheer pretentious balderdash / Stick it in your hat.

Perhaps I've just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I've filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I've added a fifteenth stamp to a page, thus reducing its number of blank spaces from nineteen to eighteen. In any event, I'm looking at progress—and I take a moment to enjoy it.

that's where Fredric Brown spent his later years." "Fredric Brown? Our Fredric Brown?" "We were on the bus together." "You and Fredric Brown." "Right." "On a bus in Tucson." "When he was trying to work out a plot," I said, "he would ride buses all night, and thoughts would come to him." "I'll bet they would. 'Why am I up so late? What am I doing on this broken-down rattletrap?