Quotes About Creativity

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survivesIn the valley of its saying where executivesWould never want to tamper

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Art is born of humiliation.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. –

Money never starts an idea; it is the idea that starts the money.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

What directors, authors, comic artists, and even game designers want is to hit the audience with a cultural roundhouse. There's no way to do that effectively without pushing political buttons to overstimulate the most delicate nerve endings of personal belief, ideology, patriotism, gender roles, and unexamined hatreds.

Impropriety is the soul of wit.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.