Quotes About Creativity

The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random

I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play.

You know, Willie Wonka said it best: we are the makers of dreams, the dreamers of dreams.

We should be dreaming. We grew up as kids having dreams, but now we're too sophisticated as adults, as a nation. We stopped dreaming. We should always have dreams.

I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

Engineering is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realisation in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings homes to men or women. Then it elevates the standard of living and adds to the comforts of life. This is the engineer's high privilege.

Only things the dreamers make live on. They are the eternal conquerors.

The creative talent belongs to the outsider, and to be an outsider is the artist's fate.

Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is.

Imagination succumbs to the general degradation of phantasy. To free it for the construction of a more beautiful and happier world remains the prerogative of children and fools.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

I'm always interested in looking forward toward the future. Carving out new ways of looking at things.

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

Veertien Dertien had men net zo goed kunnen overslaan, omdat er alleen maar onzin in staat. Ik heb helemaal geen zoon, laat staan dat hij een rondleiding over mij zou presenteren in zaal Concordia. Eigenlijk had men één tot en met twaalf net zo goed kunnen overslaan omdat immers alles onzin is. Ik kan het weten, ik schrijf al die bullshit.

Poëzie: de enige plaats waar onwetendheid het van academisme kan winnen.

We have to play what is actually in demand, and we have to play it as well and as beautifully and as expressively as ever we can.

But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.