Quotes About Creativity

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don't allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

Art builds up self-knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination.

Art can do the opposite of glamourizing the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see -- that is, to notice rather than to merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it.

The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder.

There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.

the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience'.

If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

imaginative possession

We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that 'higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all .. everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].

An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor.

The development of the artist provides a profound model of the process of maturation.

which even Bash?, at the peak of his powers, would have struggled to describe as convincingly as the menu's scribe: Warm grilled chicken slices, Smoked bacon, crisp lettuce, And a warm ciabatta roll on a bed of sea-salted fries