Quotes About Creativity

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfect uninteresting in what they are.

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.

Every good story-teller nowadays starts with the end, and then goes on to the beginning, and concludes with the middle...

It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter, who on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.

Life is short, art is infinite.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain.

Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination

I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that, if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books, and what joy can be greater?

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Everyone is brilliant at breakfast.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper.

You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I put all my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life

Genius is born, not paid.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.

the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.