Quotes About Creativity

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

Let us not look for the soul of Russia in the Russian novel: let us look for the individual genius. Look at the masterpiece, and not at the frame—and not at the faces of other people looking at the frame.

the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.

Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

for she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum.

Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses

Vladimir Nabokov

Il genio è un africano che vede in sogno la neve.

You are an artist,' I said -- to say something.

Now the colored pencils in more detail.

And I have toyed with many pseudonyms for myself before I hit on a particularly apt one. There are in my notes "Otto Otto" and "Mesmer Mesmer" and "Lambert Lambert," but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Interview in Writers at Work(Fourth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1976).

The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah.

Literature under despotism: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed." - Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture – Third Reich "Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan." - Lenin pg. 7

A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as 'what is art?' and 'what is an artist's duty?

only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries

I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses

But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, Yesterday there would have been enough times - and again you think, If only I had begun yesterday...

I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings- Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada- which my heirs discover and publish.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself- in defiance of all the world's muteness.

Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence…

compuse un madrigal al negro humo de sus pestañas, al pálido gris de sus ojos inexpresivos, a las cinco pecas asímetricas de su nariz respingona, al vello rubio de sus miembros tostados; pero lo rompí y ahora no puedo recordarlo.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping , laughing... I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.

And yet I shall try again: they are murdering me!--all right, all together once more: they are murdering me! and again: murdering... I want to write this in such a way that you will cover your ears, your membranaceous, simian ears that you hide under strands of beautiful feminine hair--but I know them, I see them, I pinch them, the cold little things, I worry them with my fingers to somehow warm them, bring them to life, render them human, force them to hear me.