Quotes About Creativity

Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.

Thick skin is not the thing to have if you are an artist of any kind. It's got to be bulletproof in the sense that it lets the bullet in, and it travels through, and it comes out the other side. I've had everything hurled at me, especially in Australia. Australia is where the tough journalists are.

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew.

Why should I waste my imagination on myself? —SERGEI DIAGHILEV

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out

a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

There are no genres, there are only talents. —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, LE VOLEUR DANS LA MAISON VIDE, P. 311

In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.

That amazing thing doesn't need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: "It's about to make me a lot of money.

He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it.

Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation.

Artistic talent is indeed a gift from God, which the artist is obliged to match with the gift of his life.

Isn't a blank verse paragraph just a chunk of prose bent around corners after every five beats? Try doing that and you'll not only get lines that don't scan, you'll also get, and all too often, the one effect that you definitely don't want: successive lines that rhyme.

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art.

I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, VARIA, VOL. 1, P. 203

Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer. —WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,

Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.)

Accusing your own mother of adultery to save your skin is creativity of a kind so special it can almost be called a talent.

Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth.

Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.