Quotes About Creativity

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.

I did not write it. (Uncle Tom's Cabin) God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

Writing derives from an accumulation of experience. It's as if you collect facts and observations over time, like a stone to stand on. From there, imagination takes over.

So, for every internal voice that says 'can't', 'shouldn't', 'not good enough', remind yourself that one of the core features of creativity is exploration, a willingness to try and an acceptance that sometimes it won't necessarily go the way you planned, and that you won't always succeed.

To obey this rule, we must become sleepwalkers. We must not see clearly, think precisely, or remember freely. The amount of creative, intellectual, and sexual energy that is trapped by this need to repress anger and remain unaware of its sources is simply incalculable.

The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.

My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!

The librarians sent books to the hospitals. They answered a thousand questions put to them by the military and civil authorities: How could Leningrad make matches? How could flint and steel lighters be manufactured? What materials were needed for candles? Was there any way of making yeast, edible wood, artificial vitamins? How do you make soap? The librarians found recipes for candles in old works of the eighteenth century.

Writing is traveling through uncharted territory - your mind. You are the first traveler, and your essays are the world's first maps.

Building your brand doesn't take millions. It takes imagination.

We view Big Business as business but equate small business with art; we call it entrepreneurship.

There's little point in killing an idea by saying it might fail. Any idea might fail. If you're doing anything worthwhile at all, you'll suffer a dozen failures. Start failing so you can start succeeding

You can cage the singer but not the song.

The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.

Two bits of advice. One, always write what you love. Two, always write what the market wants. It's not that those two things are in opposition really. It's just that you have to find an intersection between the two. Writing an unmarketable book just strikes me as silly. Writing a book you don't love – now that would be evil.

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

There I was, listening to four students play something that had been written in another time in another country and it seemed like nothing less than magic. The music was mournful and all I could think about was how unhappy Mr Tchaikovsky must have been when he wrote it. Whatever his pain was, I thought I knew exactly how he felt.

A lot of the music that you listen to now is because of the things that the Meters did, the Neville Brothers did, and they're there, the guys who invented those beats that the guys sample today. Such an enormous opportunity.

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.

If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. 'Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

n Italia, sotto i Borgia, per trent'anni hanno avuto guerre, terrore, assassinii, massacri: e hanno prodotto Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci e il Rinascimento. In Svizzera, hanno avuto amore fraterno, cinquecento anni di pace e democrazia, e cos'hanno prodotto? Gli orologi a cucù.

Making the pictures ridiculous is what enables you to really see them; a logical picture is usually too vague.