Quotes About Creativity

I consider skateboarding an art form, a lifestyle and a sport. 'Action sport' would be the least offensive categorization.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn't school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex.

The truth is, a writer's voice is made from other writers' voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others.

Maybe every talk about poetry is a defense of poetry...

Poets are wounded like all other human beings, but they have somehow not been wounded into the condition of speechlessness. Not quite.

Whatever you're thinking, think bigger.

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow

It's something you learn after your second theme party: It's all been done before.

We know the secret of making art, while they only know hte minor secret of making mischief. We proceed from joy, they only have their misery.

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?

Bob's Nobs.

I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

Many people say that Steve Jobs is the Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie of our time. Those comparisons are completely incorrect. Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka.

While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci regularly took off from painting for several hours at a time and seemed to be daydreaming aimlessly. Urged by his patron, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, to work more continuously, da Vinci is reported to have replied, immodestly but accurately, 'The greatest geniuses accomplish more when they work less.

All my movies, like Revenge, are under two hours.