Quotes About Creativity

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.

You'll need to suffer to make any real art.

Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist.

On a night without moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.

Every masterpiece is just dirt and ash put together in some perfect way.

Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with friends, gardening, so I always carry pen and paper. My first draft is always written in longhand. But once the first dozen chapters, more like short stories, are written, then momentum builds until I can't leave the project until it's done.

As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

Now this is the first rule of fight club: There is nothing a blue collar Nobody in Oregon with a public school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven't already done...

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

Grace says, We all die. She says, The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Peter used to say, The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face. You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves su free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walking. Which China pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a Diary.

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything... Nothing was ever good enough, my mom says, so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

You become smart when you don't need to quote someone anymore. I am still stupid: I quoted Chuck Palahiniuk

At some point, Wax mentioned how appalling it seemed that those brilliant minds who could invent miracle medicines and nuclear fission and dazzling computer special effects, they had such a complete lack of imagination when it came to spending their money: granite countertops and luxury cars. Talking about that stuff, Wax driving, the madder he got, you could watch the speedo creep up past eighty, ninety, a hundred.

With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

Real smart begins when you quit quoting other people.

The most I can ever do is write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way.

That's the worst aspect of being a writer: managing plausibility.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

What they don't teach you in art school is never, ever to tell people you wanted to be an artist. Just so you know, for the rest of your life, people will torture you by saying how you used to love to draw when you were young. You used to love to paint. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

The measure of a man is not what he does for wages but what he does with his free time.

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies.

Suffering is key to inspiration.