Quotes About Creativity

I don't really plan to be a pop star I just want to be able to make music without the whole My Dad thing hanging over me, which everyone in my position goes through.

You can' t help being a musician because you've grown up with music, yet being one means being compared to your dad and being slated for it. But I really don't have the ambitions of most people going into the industry.

I do not quote my own movies. I think I would be pretty insufferable if I did.

Speaking of Twitter, I don't even know if I composed a blog entry in 2009, as I was too busy parceling my every thought into cute 140-character sound bites. I used to only worry about being pithy for a living now some of my best lines are wasted on a free app!

I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

I absolutely relate to being alone in squalor, trying to come up with something adequate. I relate to that, and I've been known to crawl out of bed and drink out of a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

It's possible that I've matured as a writer, and I hope I've matured emotionally, but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.

Put your blog out into the world and hope that your talent will speak for itself.

I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.

You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.

We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.

The human capacity for self-deception is very impressive, often showing breathtaking flights of creativity. —Jerry L. Horner, Daniel Seligman Research Associate

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.

We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test. I am here to share with you, it is not learning.

The first sign on a declining civilization is a decline in the arts.

The excitement of creating is followed by desperate self-doubt. Courage and inspiration compete with discouragement and despair.

Inklings followed a simple structure, and their opening ritual was always the same. When half a dozen members had arrived, Warren Lewis would produce a pot of very strong tea, the men would light their pipes, and C. S. Lewis would call out, "Well, has nobody got anything to read us?" Then "out would come a manuscript," and they would "settle down to sit in judgement upon it." The

Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.

When you look at the lives of innovators, there is often little distinction between work and play. And when creative people make it a point to spend time together, new ideas and joint projects emerge with little effort, a natural part of the rhythm of each day.

However, one of the reasons for their dissolution is that Hugo Dyson crossed this line. When he persisted in dismissing The Lord of the Rings, it changed the group. Dyson didn't critique the work: he rejected it altogether. That eroded the spirit of the Inklings. It was no longer safe to share rough drafts and far-fetched ideas. When creative people encounter thoughtful critique, they feel empowered. When they encounter dismissal, they stop taking risks. They shut down. Tolkien

10 October 1946 Tollers continued to read his new Hobbit: so sui generis, so alive with the peculiar charm of his "magical" writing, that it is indescribable—and merely worth recording here for an odd proof of how near he is to real magic. 24

Tolkien records, "The indefatigable man read me part of a new story!" In the act of sharing his own work, Lewis challenged Tolkien, providing more than a hint of friendly rivalry. But

If we are encouraged to read high fantasies like The Tempest and urged to "enjoy a magic island and 'believe' in an Ariel and a Caliban," then why should we not also "suspend our disbelief" and enjoy the invented world of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? Why not enter in and believe also in the magic of barrow-wights and orc-blades, Hobbiton, Tom Bombadil, and the tree-top city of Lothlórien?