Quotes About Creativity

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being true.

There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.

A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.

The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.

Perhaps a film which strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office.

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

L'art est la magie délivrée du mensonge d'être vrai.

I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don't take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

If you're a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Beatrice closed her eyes and dreamed whatever flowers dream. Beatrice: That's very poetic, but they don't dream anything. Flowers have no cerebral cortex.

CATHERINE: I can't write from Diana's point of view. MARY: Of course you can. You're a writer; you can write anything. Just find your inner Diana. CATHERINE: I don't have an inner Diana. DIANA: Ha! You wish. Everyone has an inner Diana.

When you're a writer, the cure for whatever ails you is always writing.

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

Alma-Tadema and Frédéric could paint nothing that was truthful either to the world or to themselves.