Quotes About Creativity

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 coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

I'm really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists

nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly for it expresses a need

For the past is what man should not have been.  The present is what man ought not to be.  The future is what artists are.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

The art of living. The only really Fine Art we have produced in modern times.

iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.

You talk books away, he said; why don't you write one? I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.

Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius. 

I know you will laugh at me, he replied, but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.

Art is not a thing. It is a way.

Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour - that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.

And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.

artists have sex but art has none

Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.

And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

Ya sabes que nosotros, los pobres artistas, tenemos que aparecer en sociedad de cuando en cuando para recordar al público que no somos salvajes.

Romantic art begins with its climax.

For myself, the only immortality I desire is to invent a new sauce.