Quotes About Creativity

Deadlines are like a drug for me. I hate and need them.

What does it take to be a writer? 1) Foolhardily believing that someone might actually be interested in reading what you've written. 2) Spending an enormous amount of time writing it as well as you can. 3) Accepting that, at best, you'll probably be paid something around 25 cents an hour for your efforts.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

There was a time when our minds were always on a roll. We used boxes and sticks to become astronauts and artists. We created fantasy characters and outrageous worlds. We drew whimsical pictures and cooked up wild ideas. We were complete originals.

Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. I short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter that process.

Scribes working throughout Christianity's first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament's discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.

Your work gets better when you let go of your anger," Harrison said. "Because anger is always didactic, and the didactic is of no value for a novelist

This type of work feeds my soul.

In television, everything is possible and nothing is sure.

Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you'll eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love.

The lateral thinking concept emerged from de Bono's study of how the mind works. He found that the brain is not best understood as a computer; rather, it is "a special environment which allows information to organize itself into patterns." The mind continually looks for patterns, thinks in terms of patterns, and is self-organizing, incorporating new information in terms of what it already knows. Given

He looked for ways in which new ideas could come into being via spontaneous insight rather than conflict.

What is humor, de Bono asks, but the sudden restructuring of existing patterns? If

But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.

Before turning his mind to creativity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-sent-me-hi) wrote a celebrated book called Flow. Its insight was that it is a mistake to pursue happiness itself. Rather, we should recognize when we are genuinely happy—what we are doing when we feel powerful and "true"—and do more of those things. Flow

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the common idea of a creative individual coming up with great insights, discoveries, works, or inventions in isolation is wrong. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture, and also depends on timing.

Creative people take their intuition seriously, looking for patterns where others see confusion, and are able to make connections between discrete areas of knowledge.

It is a myth that there is one "creative personality." Something all creative people seem to share is complexity—they "tend to bring the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

We are happiest when we are being creative because we lose our sense of self and get the feeling that we are part of something greater. We

We are actually programmed to get satisfaction and pleasure from discovery and creativity, he says, because its results lead to our survival as a species. New

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "What now?", is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it's more a cry than a question.) Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Most cooks try to learn by making dishes. Doesn't mean you can cook. It means you can make that dish. When you can cook is when you can go to a farmers market, buy a bunch of stuff, then go home and make something without looking at a recipe. Now you're cooking.