Quotes About Creativity

The Negro will have to build his own industry, art, sciences, literature, and culture before the world will stop to consider him.

In music, recording, writing, photography, design, film-making and any other creative endeavour, it may be true that anyone can do it, but it is not quite as true as punk sometimes seemed to suggest that anyone can do it in a way that is appreciated by others. The key point is that, without determination and application, talent and ideas are just unrealised potential. That lesson-there for anyone who wishes to learn it-is perhaps punk's , and the Clash's, greatest legacy.

From humble bandannas do mighty albums grow...

Mom and Dad chatting around mouthfuls of steak while Junior used the scraps of his hamburger to buttress the walls of Fort French Fry.

Busby Berkeley

They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn't imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

It's easy. Everybody else on the field, they look where the opposing line is. I look where they're going to be. Then I just head somewhere else." —BARRY ADAMS, RUNNING BACK FOR THE CHICAGO BEARS, ON HOW HE WAS ABLE TO RUSH 2,437 YARDS IN A SINGLE SEASON, SHATTERING THE PREVIOUS RECORD (2,105, BY ERIC DICKERSON IN 1984)

I love telling stories for a living. The process of writing has its frustrations, but also its joys (there's no high like typing "The End.") The research is incredible. I love meeting other authors. I love working on something that's purely mine. But the best part is the idea that I kept somebody up past their bedtime, or made them miss their train stop. As a lifelong addict of story, it makes me happy to think that my work might hit other people the way books hit me.

She said, "'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…'" She parted the curtains, looked out at the brick wall opposite and the street below. "Never really understood the poem, but I like the way the words taste.

We are never more clever than in the creation of ways to destroy ourselves.

Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

Whatever goes down, whatever turns up—make food and music and dance and story out of it.

Almost everyone has an inborn need to create; in most people this is thwarted and forgotten, and the drive is pushed into other activities that are less threatening, less difficult, and less rewarding. In some people, that need to create is transmuted into the need to destroy.

What you are saying and the way you are saying it are very closely linked. I discovered that I always had to let the book I was writing find its own style. Only in that way can you be sure that you are doing the right thing by your subject matter. It's a strange feeling -- as if the book has a life of its own.

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

When we read a book, though, we call it ours, don't we, and I have always said that's because readers make a book their own through reading it. They do half the work, with their own imaginations, fleshing things out, painting each character and place and event in more detail than we have actually set out on paper, and we writers merely set the readers on their way.

Genius is fostered by energy.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

Nothing quite new is perfect.

There were poets before Homer.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.