Quotes About Creativity

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.

Ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish, you catch the fish.

Look at Van Gogh - The guy could not sell one painting and now nobody can afford them

Actors are so filled with wonder and imagination and they get it so quick, no matter how strange something is. They get it, and their talent is to make it real from a deep place. When that happens it's really, really beautiful.

I went to a psychiatrist once. 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, l 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.

Most of filmmaking is common sense. If you stay on your toes and think about how to do a thing, it's right there.

Writers are asked, 'How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?' The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.

It is more frightening but it is not less productive to go your own way, to form your own theatre company, to write and stage your own plays, to make your own films. You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and studio.

The problem play is a melodrama cleansed of invention.

After the conflagration, in the final years of humankind, the artists will, once again, be found painting the ceilings of the caves, and the middlemen will, as always, be trying to talk the honest hunters out of their kill. And it may or may not then be remembered, or indeed believed, there was once a time when the two groups were inextricably linked.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

People who write novels only write them when they have very little else to write

Demasiadas notas, mi querido Mozart.

Jackson Pollock alguna vez fue asistente de David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Si es arte no es para todos, y si es para todos no es arte.

Matisse, consultado sobre la piel verde: No estoy pintando una mujer. Estoy pintando un cuadro.

Ese material se te ocurre cuando estás borracho? Preguntó un primo de Faulkner.

Uno no termina un poema, simplemente lo abandona.

don't expect a magic formula that'll make books fall out of your head and automatically give you a wide readership.

Writing comes out of the rift between what we have experienced and the language we've been given to express it. We write to bridge this divide, to find word adequate to our sense of reality... Creative writing is the search for and creation of a language that will express what the writer unconsciously knows but does not yet have a language to express.

There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress.' I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart." They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on "courage"—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, "all the difference.

What is the surrendered state? It means to be free of negative feelings in a given area so that creativity and spontaneity can manifest without opposition or the interference of inner conflicts.

I have so little control over the act of writing that it's all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity. Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.