Quotes About Creativity

My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that, on its own, sounds unfinished.

You can't die with an unfinished book.

There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.

I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

Good, well-defined, well-honed art is not a foreign language. You can sell it to people. You just have to move your ego out of the way, clear out the unfinished fantasies you have about being an artist yourself, and just sell it.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.

I work every day. I write every day. I walk around in silent conversation with my latest unfinished songs.

Although I did admire David Foster Wallace's final unfinished novel about boredom, I'm no DFW, and I want my books to be exciting, not boring.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

There are dozens of unfinished or aborted projects in my files, but I can only assume they don't get done because they're not robust enough to struggle through the birth process.

Right after 'Backspacer,' my best friend got killed tragically. Something happened to me then where I got super motivated. I had a shelf of all this unfinished music... So I just went to work and made a conscious decision that I was going to finish a bunch of stuff. Life's short.

I always write three or four projects at the same time. They're stories that I want to tell, and usually I dump them unfinished for the next one in order not to get too cornered and depressed about it.

I'm a nervous sharer. I'm nervous to share things in their unfinished state just because, I mean, it's kind of embarrassing. You know what it could be, but you can't explain what it's going to be.

If I feel like I've completely drained every ounce of energy out of me for this song, and I can't go any further with it, then I stop, even if the song is unfinished. Most of the time, when it's finished, it's because I've used every ounce of me to write it.

Anybody great, we're all interested in the relics. If you found an unfinished Gauguin, you'd still want to see it.

If I was a painter, I would have hundreds of finished and unfinished canvases in my studio waiting for people to see, and it is the same with my music. I've got so many pieces of music and songs waiting to be heard.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

The 'Day Shift' songs are things that would unfold during the daytime. 'Night Shift' is what would unfold during the nighttime. So, that's how I put that whole thing together. I did both all on one album budget.

Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I'm always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in 'Body Double' did I discover that Maura's mother was a serial killer.