Quotes About Creativity

The best way to get a good idea is to get a Lot of ideas. —LINUS PAULING

They overlook the possibility that brainstorming can be a skill, an art, more like playing the piano than tying your shoes.

Good brainstorms are extremely visual. They include sketching, mind mapping, diagrams, and stick figures. You don't have to be an artist to get your point across with a sketch or diagram.

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

I view art as an inspirational tool.

writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.

The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.

Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which believe the idea that things cannot be changed.

THERE HE REMAINED for almost two years, cut off from every other scholar or mathematician. The isolation suited him. "In those days," he would recall half a century later, "I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematics & Philosophy more than at any time since.

A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature's exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.

Creativity isn't always an index of niceness

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

the difficulty was in training the eye to see the whole world of usual forms -- patterns of brick, painted plaster, carved and carpentered wood -- not as "buildings" and "streets" but as an infinite series of free and arbitrary choices. There was no place in such a scheme for orders, styles, sophistication, taste. ("The Asian Shore")

Meanwhile, in the realm of Something Lower, where books are but numbers in a series, the hacks grind out and the presses print the sf equivalent of Silhouette Romances. The sheer mass of Perry Rhodan lookalikes and fantasy-gaming disguised as books is awesome in much the same way that Niagara Falls is awesome: there is so much of it and it never stops.

In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.

To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.