Quotes About Creativity

You can not shoe a flea," Russians say. Whoever coined the proverb forgot about poets.

Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".

In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean (merely average performance).

The only meaningful life is that which is deepened by carrying through these commitments, living through the dead periods in order to lay the foundations for the creative ones.

Never solve a problem from its original perspective.

I invented a new word today: plagiarism.

That's the point of working with one's hands, you see. It gives the mind something else to do besides worry.

If the redeemed sing, presumably someone must write the songs.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, said Jonathan, "once alluded to 'common observation and a plain understanding' as the source of all art.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.

Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.

Sadness was the driver, the motor of his invention, the engine of his creativity.

The sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.

She's got zero interest in honest-to-goodness human-on-human action. No. It's magic farmyard creatures or nothing for her.

Here's a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he's often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that'll do.

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip, and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.

Why should poetry have to make sense?