Quotes About Creativity

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable. Autobiography provides an alternate route—a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist's sensibility and the experiences that shaped it.

If I'm anything, I'm not a singer, I'm a song stylist.

Poetry was alive and dangerous.

Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of possibilities.

To win, you've got to put the ball in the macramé.

Writing is the only place I can be myself and not feel judged.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

They say there is a fine line between genius & insanity....so I picked it up & went fishing

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock—shock is a worn-out word—but astonish.

Theory is meaningless to a genius.

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conondrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another?

The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

If you've lived only by reasonableness, well, you have missed the show, haven't you?

A beautiful bridge is a poem.

This is what had always happened to women when they had too much time to think: they made themselves conduits to all the passions in the universe, they dreamed open all the possibilities that sane hard-working people kept shut away.