Quotes About Creativity

The greats - they protect their sleep because it's where the best work comes from. They say no to things. They turn in when they hit their limits. They don't let the creep of sleep deprivation undermine their judgment.

There have been several occasions during the course of Fleetwood Mac over the years where we've had to undermine whatever the business axioms might be to sort of keep aspiring as an artist in the long term, and the 'Tusk' album was one of those times.

The work of black creatives seems to always get undermined in one way or another, and that's what this new generation is actively changing by speaking up. We aren't accepting group categorization and group classifications to describe our work anymore - it just leads to group dismissal.

Film directing is really undermined if you attempt to do it by committee because there has to be a single vision as to how to tell a story. It's like if you were at a campfire, and everyone is taking turns to give one sentence in telling a horror story. It would be a mess - it's not going to make sense.

All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.

What I hope 'Mastry' ends up doing is completely undermining or doing away with the notion that artists are a savant: that they do things that can't be articulated, driven by inner turmoil they don't have access to.

I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

There is a pressure, but my job essentially is not to listen to that pressure, not to buckle underneath that pressure, but instead to continue making music in the way that I have been making it.

I took out a whole fireplace and put in broken glass and installed a burner underneath, so it looks like fire on ice. I did that in my bedroom suite. I'm pretty handy.

The ability to make new work from old work - especially if that new work is different enough that it doesn't dent the market for the old work - is something that benefits all creators, since so few can claim not to have a giant or 10 supporting them underneath.

And then as I frequently do, some times I'll peek out from underneath the focusing cloth and just look around the edges of the frame that I'm not seeing, see if there's something that should be adjusted in terms of changing the camera position.

With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.

If you think hard enough about it, Rowlf the dog playing the piano on 'The Muppet Show' - what kind of insanity was happening underneath the cameras to make that happen? His mouth is moving, and he's got two hands playing the piano. That's two people under there!

My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.

We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.

I've gone down several paths. I started school as an engineer, but underneath it all, I knew I wanted to use instruments, not build them.

I wouldn't say I'm underrated, but more reserved. Only time will tell, but I've been good so far in being consistent and making hit after hit writing for myself and other artists, from rap to R&B, and being able to make those different records.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Lyrics are so important, but they're really underrated.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.