Quotes About Creativity

Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful.

Nothing within the limits of the human imagination and mind is impossible. If it were, we could not imagine it or dream it.

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.

How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.

Microserfs (1995) p28 'He's thinking of quitting [Microsoft] to be a pixelation broker, going around to museums to digitize their paintings

There's something fun about Sharpies that's really hard to articulate.

When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too. But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened.

Next book. It's embryonic in my head, but it's conceived. I don't want to discuss it for fear of screwing up the zygote.

Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.

It's called 'designer prisoner-of-conscience labour.

One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness.

And that's the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.

win a game of Scrabble using only three vowels. He can also bring fresh air into an unventilated bathroom, and he can renovate castles and huts on small budgets using knick-knacks from thrift stores and some well-chosen latex paint colours.

nothing is impossible. you just need to learn how to bend the rules.

I have my books. I don't live in the actual world.

Manuel is a superb engineer with no imagination whatsoever, which makes him doubly dangerous - talent married to convention.

I have my books. I don't live in the actual world. I am imperturbable.

Mary and Joseph," he said, "turned a very embarrassing situation into one of the greatest coups in history. Clever, clever, clever!

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Perish the men who said our good things before us!