Quotes About Creativity

If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, wouldn't it be a Merry Christmas?

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time.

In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found....

To my knowledge, I was the first guy really to do what I do. And then later on different comedians started trying doing it.

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

La qualità della vostra vita dipende da ciò che farete. Gli unici limiti alle avventure sono i limiti della vostra immaginazione.

Il talento non esiste, capitano. Esistono soltanto l'ispirazione e l'ambizione.

I don't even know what sound is, much less what it's for. It isn't to make money that's for sure. I've never made any.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

looks out at a wave breaking like a white pencil being drawn across a blue piece of paper.

Shut up! We can't hear the mimes! —Jacques Prévert Les Enfants du Paradis

Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling.

Originality is the last refuge of a hero...

I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, It is not clear that... is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a storyof getting past the readers hardwon armor.

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.

I enjoy doing layoutproblems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.