Quotes About Creativity

Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.

One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward dark.

Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.

In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them.

Woman must write herself and bring woman into literature

Écris, que nul ne ce retienne, que rien ne t'arrête : ni homme, ni imbécile machine capitaliste où les maisons d'édition sont les rusés et obséquieux relais des impératifs d'une économie qui fonctionne contre nous et sur notre dos ; ni toi-même.

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs

I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

To such as these we offer, with some confidence, and with no little sympathy, our collection of choice flowers, culled from the gardens of Poesy: may they refresh the mind, and gladden the heart, and beautify the path, of many a careworn toiler in the fields of labour, of whatsoever kind.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

When starting out, don't worry about not having enough money. Limited funds are a blessing, not a curse. Nothing encourages creative thinking in quite the same way.

In business or in life, don't follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Don't waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.

Wear audacious underwear under the most solemn business attire.

Resist telling people how something should be done. Instead, tell them what needs to be done. They will often surprise you with creative solutions.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It's abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in detail. What artists have accomplished is realizing that there's only a small amount of stuff that's important, and then seeing what it was.

With Ruysdael and Turner, if you look at the way they construct complicated water, it is clearly done in an iterative way. There's some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that. Turbulent fluids for those painters is always something with a scale idea in it.

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. That was why scientists played with toys.

The potential application of a piece of pure thought can never be predicted

Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as "the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board."?

He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys.