Quotes About Creativity

'The Kumars'... played on five continents, and even when I came up with the idea, I was slightly surprised that no one else had.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

I'm always coming back with too much footage. Most filmmakers do, but I'm always surprised that it keeps happening to me.

The key is to constantly keep the audience surprised. If they feel like something is going to happen, or they think from an educational standpoint that something is about to happen because of all the moving parts, it is your job to break that expectation and show the audience something different.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

To some extent, I'm mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes.

I'm always surprised when a sequel is not as good or better than the first one. I never understand that. You've already set your own bar. You've already done the hard work. It should be easier to make the second one, but a lot of the times, it's not.

I enjoy working with actors so much and having the chance to be surprised by them.

You can't be lazy in fashion. You're always going to be surprised.

We get excited by ideas, and we're more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We've found that leads to more interesting storytelling.

I don't plot, and I don't plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

There is a great difference between discoveries and inventions. With discoveries, one can always be skeptical, and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can really only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it.

I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

It was important on The Shipping News to have my house far enough away from each location so I had this time in the morning to think about my shots and still remain open to surprises once I got to the set.

I think it's good to have surprises in fashion because we always see the same things.

My surprises come usually once I start rolling and photographing.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

It really surprises me that people in this day and age still write such busy music and fill up every space with layer upon layer of sound... it's like musical landfill.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.