Quotes About Creativity

I don't work well outside the lines; my report card once read, "doesn't play well with others."

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

"To fashion stars out of dog dung, that is the Great Work. To take a negative experience and, by comparing it to something worse, make it feel good, is the great skill."

Where people aren't having any fun, they seldom produce good work.

I still have a steady stream of book cover work. I'm grateful for it. Viva le book!

It is the natural instinct of a child to work from within outwards; "First I think, and then I draw my think." What wasted efforts we make to teach the child to stop thinking, and only to observe!

The more I give myself permission to live in the moment and enjoy it without feeling guilty or judgmental about any other time, the better I feel about the quality of my work.

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.

To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.

The only way to be an actor is to find ways to work as an actor, even if that means doing a one-man show by a river.

I'd rather work on my radio show, which no one hears but I put about eight hours of programming and writing into it for those 30 people who do tune in.

Don't wish for "secrets" of the masters, either. There are none worth fooling with. They had no special mediums or paints, nor special brushes that made their work great.

The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

The majority of the people I work with are more than musicians and singers, they are personal friends and friends help each other.

It is the object which aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.

I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.

One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work.

In general, and most especially with artists, I pay as much attention to the man who does the work, as to the work itself.

I've always worn a hat when I work. I think it also comes from a picture of Rothko I saw with a painter's hat on.

I had to teach myself to let go of the conventional rock way of playing guitar and singing. Some things you wouldn't expect to work, did and some things won't ever work.

I never sat down and decided to make work about life and death. It just all comes out of my head like water pouring out of a jug.