Quotes About Creativity

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

That's why I like fast film. It gives you more freedom to light more naturally.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

It was 100 feet of 16 mm black-and-white film of a car coming to a stop sign, and driving off. I had to decide how to frame and light it. It was magic. There was a sense of mystery.

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to "Write hard and clear about what hurts." It's good advice. But to follow it, you must stop reading.

To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.

The words must conjure the character of a place for readers who may never see it. This may seem like magic, or incomparable talent, but the inspiration starts with acute observation.

Why do so many of us, when we sit down to write, sound like word processors rather than wordsmiths? Why do we spew the slogans of the consumer culture we work for, rather than sounding like the bards we want to be?

The art of sentence making comes down to experimentation, skill, and variety. Just because you can do the three-and-a-half-somersault tuck off the high board doesn't mean you must ditch the gorgeous swan dive. Good sentences can be short and muscular, and they can be long and graceful.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.

Don't look for mysteries. I give you pure joy.

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

Create like a god. Command like a king. Work like a slave!

Create your own method. Don't depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

discovering (or creating) new market space (that is, innovation!) should be the goal and ambition of every company.

Successful innovators focused on technology as a driver of value, not just as a tool for operational efficiency.

Dancing is like dreaming with your feet!