Quotes About Creativity

I think you have to get better, as you get older. Or, your perspective gets better, even if the work doesn't seem any better. When I was writing songs when I was 17, I was trying to write from a more experienced point of view. As you get older, you're not writing from an imagined point of view. You guess less.

It's really a lot easier to write about things that are problematic. Who wants to hear how happy you are?

I don't know where creativity comes from, but I think everybody has the ability to be creative. I think what's important about creativity starts when you're very young and how we're allowed to experience our imagination. The people who bring us up and teach us are fundamental in either encouraging creativity or discouraging creativity. My imagination was always encouraged.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

I've been writing seriously since the 90s and my first manuscript was a "hysterical." I was in love with Vikings back then but somehow my Vikings sounded like Navy SEALs on horses. I guess my love for Navy SEALs can be traced back to those Viking sea marauders!

Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.

Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.

Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot We women who write poetry. And when you think How few of us there've been, it's queerer still. I wonder what it is that makes us do it, Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise, The fragments of ourselves.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.

Poets so their verses write, Heap them full of life and light, And then fling them to the rude Mumbling of the multitude.

In creating, the only hard thing's to begin; A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak, If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.

New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.

The music never leaves. Once you have it, you can't lose it.

Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

If you put junk in, you're going to get junk out; but if you find inspiration, you're going to come up with things that you would never think of otherwise. Your lungs breathe even when you don't think about it. Your heart pumps without your help. Your brain is working on ideas and solutions even when you don't realize it.

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

I can't avoid writing. It's a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.

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There is nothing in the universe about which art cannot be created.

I find that as soon as I put words and ideas onto paper in my notebook, or type them into my computer, they begin to gather to themselves more images, more words and ideas. As I write I have the sensation of being at the center of a small vortex of enlarging connections, as in the poem above, and my pen or my fingers on the keyboard move faster and faster to keep pace with them.