Quotes About Creativity

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

When a painting I'm working on becomes my singular focus—when I am "in the zone," as I've heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, 'Wake up!

He sat on the rug and shouted correct answers to the contestants. His wild hair blocked off a corner of the screen. "You're pretty smart," I said during a commercial. "And you thought all I could do was hang wallpaper." He laughed. "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.

My art comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

Your very flesh shall be a great poem...

A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

The poet is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not.

he cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul; And your very flesh shall be a great poem…

The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself, and makes one.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most         spiritual poems; And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality, For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul, and of         immortality.

Although this poetry collection was first published in 1855, when Whitman was 36 years old, the poet spent his whole life revising the poems in several editions.

Poets to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.