Quotes About Creativity

So there was something of a learning curve with doing your own thing and people seeing you outside of the band. I mean, people have never really heard my voice before - or heard a whole record of mine before. So it was a completely new experience.

Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.

Why don't you steal the pattern out of Kenton's '23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West'?" the trombonist, an alumnus of Stan Kenton's big band, said.

She stopped me cold when she said, 'What color is the wind?'

I was born to catch dragons in their dens / And pick flowers / To tell tales and laugh away the morning / To drift and dream like a lazy stream / And walk barefoot across sunshine days.

Don't you know That lovers make the rains, Call forth the sun, Re-route hurricanes, And exorcise earthquakes for fun.

If you can dream it, you can write it. After all, a dream is just a dream until you bring it to fruition.

As an Odd-Fish, it is not my job to be right,' said Sir Oort. 'It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways.

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.

in sum, he had been satisfied reading Homer's Odyssey instead of setting off to create his own?

The greatest danger we face from this machine age is that we will become engrossed with mechanical gadgets and forget we have hearts. Man cannot live by bread alone nor by machinery alone. The heart must be nurtured. For this reason the prophet and the poet are more important to a nation than the engineer or the inventor. Longfellow and Whittier have meant more to us than Edison or Ford. Burns's songs have meant more to Scotland than Watts's steam engine.

Likewise a poet.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

Clothes are inevitable. They are nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.

Music without passion or soul is just a collection of notes, right?

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." —James Longenbach

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.