Quotes About Creativity

Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.

Through a painting, we can see the whole world.

I don't believe in the creativity of the curator. I don't think that the exhibition-maker has brilliant ideas around which the works of artists must fit. Instead, the process always starts with a conversation, in which I ask the artists what their unrealized projects are, and then the task is to find the means to realize them.

Very often, in the visual arts, if you take the first work of a visual artist, it already includes almost everything they do later.

I think that one of the things I have always found most attractive about art and music and culture is the experience of how it can change one's thinking. This has always been the big pay-off for me. - Tony Conrad

The heart of this relationship is that there is one universal presence (????????) of the cause of all that is, secretly and unrecognizably binding all things together, yet dwelling in each being in a different way; this presence holds the individual parts of the whole together, in itself and in each other, unconfused and inseparable, and allows them, through this very relationship of creative unity, to live more for each other than for themselves.81

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

Con seguridad, la esencia de una gran obra de arte no ha consistido nunca en procurarle a la «naturaleza» una reproducción plena y fiel, un retrato.

I can write pretty much anywhere if you give me time and some quiet. The home is not usually the best place because I have four children. It's usually pandemonium around here!

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

I hate when a director says to me 'Here's how I envision this scene'...excuse me? It's right here in the script - I 'envisioned' it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to 'envision', you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?

Get a day job, make your money from that, and write to please yourself.

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.

The wall was an eyesore in its newness, grayness, lack of grace. That much blank space might not set a regular person's blood racing, but to an artist, it's like opening up a new sketchpad, the kind with heavy textured paper. Impossible to leave it empty.

After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

I once knew this guy. Went by the name ShakesSPHERE. Greatest writer who ever lived, only he never wrote anything down.

Strong students, like strong writers, will find the sustenance they must have. And strong students, like strong writers, will rise in the most unexpected places and times, to wrestle with the internalized violence pressed upon them by their teachers and precursors.

The Anxiety of Influence

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

[Poems] are necessarily about other poems; a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.