Quotes About Creativity

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

Art is not a sack race.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there's anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

Nabokov once said that the price of being a writer was sleepless nights. But, Nabokov added slyly, if the writer doesn't have sleepless nights, how can he hope to cause sleepless nights in anyone else?

Al llevarme a casa, Harry me dijo —¿cómo podía no saberlo?—que Jackson Pollock se había rebanado la punta de su dedo meñique a los siete años. ¡Siete! Jesucristo. Ni siquiera mi dolor era original

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

Literature is not an instruction manual.

Lucien was exultant over his design, brimming with pride as if he'd just won the Prix de Rome. Delighted with his own ingenuity, he experienced the same sense of exhilaration that had swept over him at the rue Galilée.

I see. Tell me, monsieur, do you like a challenge? To solve a unique problem?" "Yes, indeed, I love to come up with a solution for any architectural problem," said Lucien, "and the more challenging, the better." He

Lucien had complete creative freedom. It wasn't just a canard that an architect needed a good client to produce great art.

An architect should never rationalize a change in purely aesthetic terms, you know that. He should give the client a pragmatic reason for doing it." Lucien

And if it was a project, would it be a chance to show his talent?

When I lay down the pen the taper of life will expire: my existence will terminate my tale.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing is a simple way.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

Times of general calamity and confusion create great minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace, and the brightest thunderbolt is elicited from the darkest storms.

After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

I do not need drugs to be a genius, do not take a genius to be human, but I need your smile to be happy.

Genius is of no country.