Quotes About Creativity

I should like to make films that are not lowering to the spirit. A new building can be very harrowing, I should like to give people a chance to whistle.

I'm looking for something that gives me a chance to stretch. Because I have my own work, and I can do anything I want in my own work - juggle, tap dance, anything I want.

The basic creative energy of life - life force - bubbles up and courses through all of existence

A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Ein gutes Buch ist der kostbare Lebenssaft eines meisterlichen Geistes, einbalsamiert und aufbewahrt zum Zweck eines Lebens über das Leben hinaus (...)

Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.

Children are infinitely credulous. My Lisa was a dull child, but even so she came up with things that pleased and startled me. 'Are there dragons?' she asked. I said that there were not. 'Have there ever been?' I said all the evidence was to the contrary. 'But if there is a word dragon,' she said, 'then once there must have been dragons.

he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.

But the point was to be carefree, independent. Artists can't be hampered by the dailiness of ordinary life--Tony felt strongly about that. Doing the same things every day, forever bothered about money. Art has to be freed from all that.

Lowry and Augustus John)

Dolores seems to dwell only just inside language, she makes sentences the way a potter works clay, squashing them any which way into shapes that please her.

Freedom would mean rest, artistic achievement, the intellectual fulfilment of my being.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

The presence of water invites song and music; there is something about its flow, and the sound of its flow, that elicits other melodies.

Is there not something more glorious about making music than making war?

He could not bear to part with his paintings because they were an aspect of his being.

The paintings were a history of his inward life, and he did not particularly care how they fared in the exterior world of change and decay.

Stealing someone else's words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.

Where do they come from, thoughts? Like wrens, out of the sky. They arrive. Noisy, hungry, perfectly themselves.

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

That, child, is one of the glorious advantages to being a madman. I don't have to make sense. It's very liberating. You should try it sometime.

fiction is a harsher, more demanding mistress than fact.