Quotes About Creativity

Flaubert le salían las palabras con facilidad; pero también supo ver la insuficiencia subyacente de la Palabra. Recuérdese su triste definición en Madame Bovary: «La palabra humana es como una caldera rota en la que tocamos melodías para que bailen los osos, cuando quisiéramos conmover a las estrellas.»

He applauded their idealism. And yes, music might be immortal, but composers alas are not.

The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert

When I first began to write, I laid myself the rule [...] that I should write as if my parents were dead. (Page 108, US edition)

Art outlasts individual whim, family pride, society's orthodoxy; art always has time on its side.

Flaubert: encerrar y sojuzgar al gran escritor, al gran burgués, al terror, al enemigo, al sabio. Un ataque al corazón puso punto final al primer proyecto; la ceguera abrevió el segundo.

One secret of the Christian religion's success was always to employ the best moviemakers

the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive

It's generally true that success, however defined, drives artistic friends apart more than failure does.

You don't paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.

Professional critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody is living in it rent free, but even so, surely it is, well, you know… time?

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic.

I miss art. I miss art. Life would be worth living if I had art.

We're wretches but we're still capable of this - songs rising up inside us.

You must never be embarrassed when you are moved by music?' ["Madame" Lilian Stiles-Allen] counseled. 'It shows that you are a sensitive human being, capable of much feeling.

Dancers can look at a mirror, a writer can look at a page, and a painter can look at a canvas and see their work reflected back at them. But singers can only hear and feel what they are doing. After all the training, technique, use of breath, and placement of sound, it boils down to an emotional response to music and lyrics---and the way they touch one's heart and soul

But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.

Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O.McCaucus-Bigg A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn't Kinkade's name. O.McCaucus-Bigg? Braggart, are you? Kinkade would roar. Not as big as mine,laddie! A good joke, suitable for thirteen-year-old boys and bored sergeants and subalterns.

Oh, God. She'd now have to invent a bawdy verse on the spot. She'd never had to improvise so much in her entire life as she had in the last five minutes. Improvise being another word for lie, of course.

All of my books are made of sweat, blood, laughter, cat hair, chocolate and inspiration.

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It's no small matter to cross an ocean,Chagall said. More can be lost than canvas and paint. An artist must bear witness, Monsieur Fry. He cannot turn away, even if he wished to. An artist cannot bear witness if he's dead.

Willingly Andras followed him into the curved halls of calculus, where the problem of Madame Morgenstern could not exist because it could not be described by an equation.

but an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered.