Quotes About Creativity

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.

hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.

Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework. But as you become expert in a field, you'll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack! There must be a better way. Don't ignore those voices. Cultivate them. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Não sou daqueles que planejam acuradamente cada vírgula que escrevem e cada sopro de ar que exalam, de modo que a história, isto é, os idiotas de amanhã possam admirar sua perfeição.

The things you people can do now!" Unlikely Worlds said. "The stories you make!

L" energy does not seem to diminish over time. While all of the other known forms of energy seem to follow most of the Newtonian laws of physics, including burning things up and burning itself out over time, "L" energy seems to be a creative, connecting energy. Instead of burning things out, it seems to hold them together. It seems to be one of the strongest integrating, connecting forces in the universe.

A person's bathroom, I believe, is the only three-dimensional expression of their soul.

When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me.

People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized.

But art should require no instrument but memory.

Fiction gives us the second chance that life denies us.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. -Paul Theroux, novelist (b. 1941)

Normal, nice people don't become writers.

instead of tearing down the building, solidly made with a four-acre footprint, it was turned into a center for the arts—gallery upon gallery, with coffee shops and restaurants. Here and there iron clumps of machinery have been left on pedestals, looking like vorticist sculptures.

improvisational infrastructure.

Now a museum, it was filled with Frida's startling paintings and also many of Diego's, family photographs and paraphernalia, such as the corsets and leg braces that the wounded (thirty operations, including an amputated leg) Frida had worn. Out of the small, stifling rooms, the courtyard was a suburban jungle of tamed vines and trimmed trees, the whole house a work of art, a kind of habitable sculpture.