Quotes About Creativity

Question: What is a scientific author? Answer: A cross between a mimosa and a porcupine.

The principal art of the teacher is to awaken the joy in creation and knowledge.)

Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

Knowledge is restricted. Only imagination could handle the whole universe.

La Creatividad es la Inteligencia divirtiéndose

Creativity always comes a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity that it will turn out to be

in certain societies there is a systematic underestimate of one's own creativity

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened... Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be... We are apparently on the trail here of some sort of invisible or hidden hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.

as Stevenson so mournfully put it, that is the bitterness of art: you see a good effect, and some nonsense about sense continually intervenes.

Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.

Ésa es la riqueza y la dificultad de la literatura: que no es un dogma.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

It isn't only art that is incompatible with happiness, it's also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.