Quotes About Creativity

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

Reading about Shelley and Byron I get awfully fed up, realizing that these men never did a day's work in their lives; they lived off the system, were free to travel all around Europe with entourages if necessary, never wrote about a guy earning a living. That is not the world I knew, that is not the world I want to be a part of, and by and large it's not a world I'm interested in. How

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. –

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result.

I]t kind of terrified me to imagine myself spending the rest of my life tinkering on the margins of the small arguments.

The aim of any literacy, and this literacy in particular, is to "empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express.

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology. (p. 47)

As tecnologias digitais criam o ambiente propício para uma nova forma de bricolagem, ou "colagem livre", como Brown chama-a. Muitos podem adicionar ou transformar as criações de outros.

Why should it be that just when technology is most encouraging of creativity, the law should be most restrictive?

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.

Free culture depends upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an over-regulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an over-regulated-regulated market.

Steve once told me that the gestation of great products takes much longer than it appears. What seems to emerge from nowhere belies a long process of development, trials, and missteps.

But for ten minutes I'd been transported somewhere else. Andy's room. A world where toys lived. Had feelings. Had problems. I had no idea who was behind it all, but somewhere in this building there were magicians at work.

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

A painting did not have to be beautiful; it had to be true. Then it was beautiful.

He knew what was going on in painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimal, Op-Art, Less-is-More, Flat, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. If he painted a tit, it was a tit.

what he [the science fiction writer) wishes to capture on paper is different from writers in other fields.... There is no actual boyhood world once extant but now only a moment, gnawing at him; he is free and glad to write about an infinity of worlds... . PHILIP K. DICK, 1980

In the case of the SF genre, the basic rule was, is, and always has been: Come up with a startling idea and set it loose in astonishing ways in a future world.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

But I remember a scene where someone sneaks out into the woods to meet someone. ... And that's where it came from. Everything else is there to turn it from an image into a story. ... That image was strong enough for me to never give up on it, no matter what my editors and agents thought.