Quotes About Creativity

I use a lot more chords than most organists and I'm careful to phrase them with the guitar.

I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.

If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

If you start with a good idea, you can encapsulate it in a phrase and explain it. I like high-concept films. Everyone can get hold of it. I don't think there's any harm in that at all.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

I'll hear a phrase around me that someone says... I'll write it down in my notebook, and as soon as I'll sit down with my guitar, I'll come up with the rest of the arrangement there.

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and 'good, orderly direction' to enter.

You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.

If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

I think you should be able to imagine things in a different way. And, you have to dedicate both your physical and mental abilities to that ambition to accomplish it.

Creative burnout and physical burnout is real. I mean, there are moments when I get home - after overseeing, you know, almost 16 collections a year - where I can't move.

I get bursts of creativity with bursts of physical activity.

I think we all have this special equation with our art where we don't feel the need for anything else; it almost gives you everything. It gives you physical strength, it gives you mental peace.

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.

I'm not afraid, as a writer, of being emotional. I'm obsessed with human emotion, body parts, physicality.