Quotes About Creativity

Bartholine was not of their kind. She had no interest in the affairs of the fields and the stables, no taste for the dairy and the kitchen — none whatever. She loved poetry. She lived on poems, dreamed poems, and put her faith in them above everything else in the world.

Jacobsen once jestingly compared himself to the sloth (det beromte Dovendyr Ai-ar) which needed two years to climb to the top o f a tree. It was necessary for him to withdraw absolutely from the world and to retire, as it were, within the character he wished to portray before he could set pen to paper. Hanna Astrup Larsen (Introduction to Marie Grubbe, New York 1917)

The bona fide artist must be governed as little as possible by law-governed nature, the material encountered. This can lead to attempts to escape, or direct attention away from, all things concrete and finite, but much commoner in modernity has been a conception of the artist as one who masters and controls, bends the material to predetermined purposes.

The artist, that is to say, begins by looking to the world around him, and then, on the basis of his powers of observation, offers some perceptual account of it for our appreciation.

To be new or original, after all, is proof that we are alive and have agency, that we are not enmeshed in an inexorable chain of cause and effect.

For all its interconnectedness, music is marked by a unique and irreducible integrity, its own way of working.

If it looks like computer graphics, it is not good computer graphics.

How my emotions starred as I played! During one of this tug-of-war contest between knowing right and doing wrong, I wrote the words to a song on my own for the first time.

I've said it before and I'm going to say it here again, now. Nothing brilliant has ever resulted from a meeting.

would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go 'wow'. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

Flirting is the oil that lubricates the engine of ingenuity and wit

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly's, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.

The only difference between genius and insanity is that genius has its limits.

I hate when people act like music is nothing but wild creativity," Logan said. "That's bullshit. It's also about counting and measuring and calibrating. If you do it right." He passed his hand over my MP3 player sitting on the bed between us. It was playing Mozart to help my concentration. "And if you do it really right, no one can tell how hard it is for you. You can let them believe it's magic, because that means you must be magic. You're worth worshipping.

Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.

We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.

A book is an experiment, and as with all experiments, there is a sense of uncertainty about how it will turn out.

A poem should not mean/ but be.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion-these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Automation and technology would be a great boon if it were creative, if there were more leisure, more opportunity to engage in raising a family, providing guidance to the young, all the stuff we say we need. America will work if we're all in it together. It'll work when there's a shared sense of destiny. It can be done!