Quotes About Creativity

Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.

That internal ache is the starting point of country music. If it's a happy song and I can still feel sad in it? That's my favorite.

We do not evaluate the result but the starting point of the creative process. Precisely, this shows whether the form was discovered by starting from life, or for its own sake. That is why I consider the creative process so essential. Life for us is the decisive factor.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true.

It's good to give people a jolt. If they're expecting one thing, it's important to give them something else. If you do something startling, audiences might at first freak out, but then they start to think, 'This is not going to be conventional. I'm going to enjoy this.'

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

I don't think I've ever made a claim to startling originality.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

If we take a step back and look at what Snapchat is, it all starts with the camera.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.

I'm a natural blonde, but my hair has been almost every color you can imagine. As an actor, I like to get into my character as much as I can, and often that starts with the color of my hair.

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

Doing one movie every two years is about all I can handle 'cause, being the creator at '30 Rock', my year there starts in the middle of June and goes back around until March.

I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

Everything I make starts very personally.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

Every song I write, including 'Too Close,' always starts on the guitar.