Quotes About Creativity

Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eighths-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. "Okay," you say. "Do you want to know how I met you?" I nod. "It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You

When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened—how we all became so imperfect.

But one night I was just so wired from being with Tris that I had to stay up until I turned the evening into a song.

I didn't write autobiography. I wrote to leave autobiography behind.

He asked me if I wrote, and I told him the truth - that I was still observing, and hadn't yet found the words.

David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.

I'm not sure we're any better, but able to describe the attempt to track our wandering in circles in a way that perhaps somebody else can identify with. I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.

but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

Art for art's sake but money for Christ's sake.

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it's a little fish—a fragment of an idea—that fish will draw in other fish, and they'll hook onto it. Then you're on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

Within your own self is a treasury, an ocean of pure bliss, consciousness, intelligence, creativity, love, happiness, energy, and peace… within every human being. Experience that and you will begin to know yourself, which is unbounded, eternal totality

It doesn't do any good to say, 'This is what it means.' When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.

It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.

I was doing something that had become a pattern in my life, and I thought, Well I should go talk to a psychiatrist. When I got into the room, I asked him, 'Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity?', And he said ´Well, David, I have to be honest; it could´ And I shook his hand and left.

When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it's almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it's not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it's not going to translate. It's going to lose.

But if you know that you've got to be somewhere in half an hour, there's no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things.

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn't so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don't think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It's emotion and intellect going together. That's essential for the filmmaker.

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate.

Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it's still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that's one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.

I don't know how I got to that thing of not caring what other people think, but it's a good thing. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it's like falling in love with a girl. It could be a girl you wouldn't want to take home to your parents, but you don't care what anybody else thinks. You're in love and it's beautiful and you stay true to those things.

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it.