Quotes About Creativity

Cézanne. Riopelle and Lemieux. Kenojuak Ashevak.

Emily Carr. And the ridicule she'd endured at the hands of gallery owners, critics, a public too afraid to go where she wanted to take them.

I am going to become a writer for Cosmo - you don't have to make any sense at all. Or maybe I'll be a bloke, they don't have to make sense either.

When Mutti and Vati came in I didn't speak to them. I just unfurled the CAT MOLESTERS banner I had made." ? Louise Rennison, Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience--but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.

Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.

Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.

I always try to leave room for improvisation and responsive musicianship. That's what makes the music feel alive every night and makes playing fun every time. You're not just doing the same thing you performed the night before, even if it's the same song.

I'm really just trying to do things that I enjoy. I'm trying to play music that I like to play and like to listen to. I just have to think if I like those different kinds of music, there are other people who aren't so different from me.

Clearly, I'm not trying to write songs for the radio.

I'm a very lucky man. I get to do the thing I want most in life, write songs and sing them for people, and ride bikes. I love my family. I love my home. I get to work with people I've admired my whole life. It's a pretty good life.

I don't know what it is about the shower that generates creative thoughts. Maybe it's the hot water. Maybe it's being unencumbered even by the restriction of clothing.

Fortunately, I've never had a job.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

I joke that I've never been burdened by having an actual hit. There's something to that. My records have sold enough to make the record company money to help me keep my job. But I've never had anything so firmly ingrained in the mind of the public that I'm expected to repeat it.

Writin' songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along.

Beyond hoping that someone will like one of my songs, I don't think about how a song will be received. I just hope that, when somebody hears one of my songs, they'll want to hear it again.

If you forget the words to your own song, you can always claim artistic license. Forget the words to the national anthem and you're screwed.