Quotes About Creativity

Non fidatevi mai dell'artista. Fidatevi del racconto.

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

If there weren't so many lies in the world ... I wouldn't write at all.

And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth.

The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity.

Let's try, said Evelyn. Let's do it for the mermicorns.

When fate hands you lemons, make lemonade.

When he was a boy (Carnegie) back in Scotland, he got hold of a rabbit, a mother rabbit. Presto! He soon had a whole nest of little rabbits and nothing to feed them. But he had a brilliant idea. He told the boys and girls in the neighbourhood that if they would go out and pull enough clover and dandelions to feed the rabbits, he would name the bunnies in their honour. The plan worked like magic.

Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable; it often stimulates the creativity of the persons whom you ask. People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics.

New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.

a great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.

Genius lies not in making the great discoveries, but in seeing the connections between the smaller ones...

Now that she thought of it, why couldn't anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time?

There is never any hurry on the creative plane; and there is no lack of opportunity.

There is a genius in every man and woman, waiting to be brought forth.

You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.

If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.