Quotes About Creativity

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.

The gift that isn't big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can't be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can't find a singer. It's a special sort of hell.

There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.

You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters— twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.

Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?

You remember the little poem by Ibsen that I quoted to you during one of our early meetings? MYSELF: Only vaguely. Something about self-judgement. DR. VON HALLER: No, no; self-judgement comes later. Now pay attention, please: To live is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self.

Without new visions, we don't know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us

Hawkins sought out the freshest, most original musicians, and had little patience for those who would quibble over the difference between "modern" or "progressive," "swing" or "bebop." "I don't think about music as being new, or modern, or anything of the type," he mused. "Music doesn't go seasonable to me."44

Thelonious Monk's music is essentially about freedom.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

My capacity for invention is flash hot stark, I thought. Sucker sunshade. Disembodied radar-reconnaissance. Not to mention Bitter Chocolate Death and Killer Zebras. Pity about the rest of me.

A writer who isn't writing isn't really alive.

I'd be looking at some stony sculpture Michelangelo would have killed his grandmother to be able to do, and thinking, I don't know that color, that color doesn't exist, but like wow.

I have a new theory about algebra, I said. I'm going to learn it by osmosis.

the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill

Never forget the power of music. Spend a little time with it every day

A person without self-expression is a person without personal freedom.

An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production.

Spring has past, summer has gone and winter is here. And the song that I meant to sing remains unsung. I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument.

There is a huge value placed in our world on doing what everyone else is doing and thinking as everyone else is thinking.

Picasso once said, 'It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child

I am an artist at living — my work of art is my life.

Soy un artista del vivir; mi obra de arte es mi vida. SUZUKI

First of all, begin to live out of the glory of your imagination, not your memory. ROBIN SHARMA The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (Kindle Location 642)