Quotes About Creativity

I have a writer's concentration: intense, but flickering.

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts

The second flaw is that some activities, almost by definition, defy being broken down into steps.

each of the best minds ends by making fairy tales

The successful people are the ones that can think up stuff for the rest of the world to keep busy at.

They don't know this stuff because (a) their time was better spent making music; (b) they weren't interested; (c) it sounded too complicated; and/or (d) learning it was too much like being in school.

No creative work is ever the product of one person alone (no matter how tempting it is to believe our own hype)

If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. We can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned, American way. We're going to invent our way out, working together.

I always tell actors not to use their face for nothing. Don't start scribbling on the paper until you have something to write.

Creative power can pull down mountains of evil and level hilltops of injustice.

As long as you are going to think anyway, think big.

As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big.

Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.

Fashion is all about happiness. It's fun. It's important. But it's not medicine.

self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization

Donita K. Paul

I could play it safe by recording songs that are familiar, but am I expanding myself as an artist by doing covers? It's a catch-22. It's called show business: The word 'business' is in it, and you've got to be a businessman. But then again, you have to be true to yourself as an artist.

It's a lot of work to keep reinventing yourself and coming up with new stuff, but that's what it takes to be in show business.

Our students sometimes use their creativity to do wrong things, and we therefore conclude that we must keep them from being creative. But evil cannot be blamed on creativity. (p31)

A book can be an escape from the house.

Writing about sex is not as personally revealing as one might think, because like anything else you write about, the words are not the deed. I have not done those words, I have done and felt private things for which words such as "sex" and "lust" are only poor apologies.

Worry never helped anything, so why turn to it during times of need? It won't nurture or heal you—quite the opposite, actually. It's so much better to put the effort into something creative as a way to quietly meditate through positive action. Create, create, create!