Quotes About Creativity

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

I don't think science fiction is a very good name for it, but it's the name that we've got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is if I'm just called a sci-fi writer. I'm not. I'm a novelist and poet. Don't shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don't fit, because I'm all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

Of course, I'd like to produce and direct a blockbuster, but you gotta build up to that. So now I'm learning from a bunch of little movies. And it's more fun with smaller pictures. It's more creative.

Locked up eighteen years, without even a television set or a newspaper. Needlework might seem pretty important if it was all you could do.

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Moliere and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

It may be those who do most, dream most.

The words came fast and slow, because the act of writing plunged me so wantonly down slippery avenues of thought that frequently I found myself not writing at all, my mouth open on a half-formed word with which my hand had been unable to keep pace and from which my mind had careened many seconds or whole minutes earlier like a horse having thrown its rider.

How eagerly the words spring into shape, winding themselves around a rigid latticework of meaning like the curling tendrils of ivy that crisscross my window. The skeletal branches, whose intricate fretwork clings to the screen, hold tight against a lashing wind and pelting rain.

When you are a designer, you have to be able to convey your ideas to people who are not designers; perhaps they are financing you or going to do the production, and you have to be able to turn them on to the product and its feasibility. Jony was able to do that.

Innovation," he wrote, "is rarely about a big idea; more usually it's about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and better way.

Jony, too, would become a master of the approach, agreeing with Jobs's mantra: 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Steve kept impressing on us that the design was integral to what would make us great,' said Schiller.

team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot.

We don't do focus groups—that is the job of the designer," said Jony. "It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design."12

Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it's just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It's a matter of discovery

The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road," said Brunner. "It becomes about consensus, and that's why you rarely see the spark of genius."37 Even if a great idea came along, it was impossible to get anything done. Norman described just such an occasion.

the power of human creativity can solve even the biggest challenges—and that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. – JONY IVE

everything he learned about products he learned from Heathkits as a kid. Heathkits were popular kits for building electronics like ham radios, amplifiers, and oscillators. The kits taught Jobs that products were manifestations of human ingenuity, not magical objects dropped from the sky.

In a company that was born to innovate, the risk is in not innovating," Jony said. "The real risk is to think it is safe to play it safe.

Jobs said that he looked to his hero Bob Dylan for inspiration. One of the things that Jobs admired about Dylan was his refusal to stand still. Many successful artists at some point in their careers atrophy: they keep doing what made them successful in the first place, but they don't evolve. "If they keep on risking failure, they're still artists," Jobs said. "Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.