Quotes About Creativity

I'm always amazed at how you never destroy my cars the same way twice. This one is especially clever the way it's impaled on the tree.

Wouldn't you rather make a sweater or a hat?" "That would ruin it. It would have to be perfect. I'd have to think and count stitches. This way if I make a mistake, it's all part of the beauty of it. My thing isn't perfect because it's a reflection of life. Life isn't perfect. Besides, a sweater or a hat would

photograph?" "Information

I wasn't much good with a gun, but I was bitchin' with an aerosol can.

I don't have a car. How am I going to get around?" "Taxi. Skateboard. Drone pickup. Figure it out!

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.

What happened to a dream without a dreamer?

Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

It's their skins I'm peeling, she said. The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

Unvollendete, Meredith said. Unfinished

It's magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.

It's the difference between a true artist and everybody else. Claire sighed. They can remake the world.

the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.

Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he'd taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels.

And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother's gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn't let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.