Quotes About Creativity

Eleanor Roosevelt would have said curiosity. As she declared in 1934, "I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity."45 Indeed, recent research has linked curiosity to happiness, satisfying relationships, increased personal growth, increased meaning in life, and increased creativity

Work ethic (chapter 1) Resilience (chapter 2) Originality (chapter 3) Childlike imagination (chapter 4) Insatiable curiosity (chapter 5) Passion (chapter 6) Creative maladjustment (chapter 7) Rebelliousness (chapter 8) Cross-border thinking (chapter 9) Contrarian action (chapter 10) Preparation (chapter 11) Obsession (chapter 12) Relaxation (chapter 13) Concentration (chapter 14)

The transformative novelist J. K. Rowling has confessed to having "a distinct lack of motivation at university," her undistinguished record the result of spending "far too long in the coffee bar writing stories and far too little time at lectures.

Dr. Samuel Johnson discounted that notion: "Sir, a woman's composing is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Should Shakespeare have stayed home in Stratford-on-Avon to help rear his family and not have abandoned them for London, the city that made him?

But his sister, Nannerl, in a short biography in 1800, defended Mozart's memory, saying "It is certainly easy to understand that a great genius, who is preoccupied with the abundance of his own ideas, and who soars from earth to heaven with amazing speed, is extremely reluctant to lower himself to noticing and dealing with mundane affairs.

The son of Mark Twain recounted that his father paced while he worked: "Some of the time when dictating, Father walked the floor . . . then it always seemed as if a new spirit had flown into the room."24 Bill Gates is a pacer, too. "It helps him organize his mind and see what others can't see," says his wife, Melinda.

Genius is only childhood recovered at will.

Pablo Picasso initially lost custody of his inner child and had to work to get it back. "Every child is an artist," he said. "The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

If the portraitist Chuck Close cannot remember faces, the artist Stephen Wiltshire sees and remembers everything. Wiltshire has an eidetic, or photographic, memory. He can look at a cityscape or scene in London, New York, Rome, Dubai, or Tokyo just once, for twenty minutes or so, and later meticulously replicate what he has seen in every detail.

As Picasso said with his typical oxymoronic wit, "It takes a very long time to become young.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination," Walt Disney said. "But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.

As the eternal child Albert Einstein said in 1929, "I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

The poet Charles Baudelaire got it right when he observed in 1863, "Genius is only childhood recovered at will."35

Leonardo was a doer. He painted, of course, but he also went into the mountains to examine rocks and fossils and to the tidal marshes to look at the wings and flying habits of dragonflies. He took apart machines to see how they worked and took apart humans to the same end. He recorded all of his discoveries in what amounted to about thirteen thousand pages of notes and drawings.

There's no such thing as im-POSSIBLE, Hiccup, only im-PROBABLE. The only thing that limits us are the limits to our imagination

And now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear-shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at the darkest.

There were dragons when I was a boy.

Art is the lie that tells the truth

Magic is the oldest part of the show business profession. It can now be used as a forward-thinking tool to build a child's confidence. It has been an amazing part in many entertainers' lives, including Steve Martin and the late Johnny Carson.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.

I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them and I really liked having them around.

I would've liked to have been Poussin, if I'd had a choice, in another time.