Quotes About Creativity

You can kill the poet but never his rhyme

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?

As a person, I was born to give out my opinions. By giving out my opinions, I realize who I am. As long as I can communicate, I'm not so lonely. If I cannot travel, or do art, or have company, if they take away all my belongings, it doesn't matter at all.

If I have a creed, this is it: My god is language, written and read. And there is no other god but this.

Ser artista es más complicado de lo que parece —Dijo Úrsula. -Ser cualquiera es más complicado de lo que parece —Dijo Paul.

The Giver has communicated himself in the gift of being in such a way that the creative act reaches to the core of the creature's freedom.

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

You know what, sweetheart? If you ever feel even slightly inclined to come into my office and seduce me while I'm writing, you should act on it. Immediately. Even if I'm on the phone with my editor. Even if my parents are there. Even if I happen, for whatever reason, to be hosting a meeting with the pope. I will stop the discussion, and I will pleasure you right then and there, in a wholly spectacular fashion.

Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.

Ainsley Harriott

But you never know what you can create if you put your heart into it unreservedly, and never let anyone else make you feel as if you don't belong. Because a rebel is just a guy who doesn't have the good sense to go the same way the crowd is going, and the composure to act like that was his idea all along.

Tattooing is definitely an art form," Kenzo said. "I do agree with you about that, and I've recently learned to appreciate the beauty of the art tattoo. But tell me, speaking not as a collector but strictly as a physician and a rational man, don't you think it's stupid to undergo so much pain and expend so much energy on self-mutilation? I mean, surely no one with an iota of common sense would ever do such a thing.

Anyone can criticize. But no ordinary talent can justify his criticism with concrete suggestions that really improve something.

There are sometimes such human beings among film critics—the things they say they see are so far off the beam that you would think they were possessed by some kind of demon. I suppose nothing can be done about critics, but we can't have such people among film directors.

But now, as I recall my past works in order to write about them, the people from the past whom I had at last forgotten come to life again in my head, clamoring for attention, each one asserting his own individuality. I am at a loss. Each one is to me like a child of my own that I gave birth to and raised.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

Unable to throw myself completely into painting, I explored literature, theater, music and film.

To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.

Seeing how much hope my father still cherished for my prospects as an artist, I felt like starting over in painting. I began sketching again.

In other words, I did not—and still don't—have a completely personal, distinctive, way of looking at things.

To develop a personal vision isn't easy. But when I was a young man, this insufficiency caused me not only dissatisfaction but uneasiness. I felt I had to fashion my own way of seeing, and I became more impatient. Every exhibition I went to seemed to prove to me that every painter in Japan had his own personal style and his own personal vision. I became more and more irritated with myself.

The result of spending my time on a kind of painting for which I felt no enthusiasm at all was a further, more irrevocable loss of my real desire to paint.