Quotes About Creativity

He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was "the most brilliant failure in history."33

They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.

The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeros, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way - a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good - then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always 20 times better.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

The challenge is quite formidable if you spell it out explicitly: artists must look at a three-dimensional scene with their two-dimensional retinas and then generate a two-dimensional painting that appears three-dimensional to viewers who look at it with their two-dimensional retinas.

Eventually you will get into the habit of enjoying line as a language all of its own.

New ideas are created when they can be discussed freely, but if there is a CORRECT view then you cease to have new ideas

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

I swear, Papa, I'd give my virtue if it would get my novels published,' she exclaimed in vexation. 'I'm certain we've tried everything else.

ever since she had read the girl's novel, a piece of artistry that struck her as wish-fulfilment at its most blatant...

Some people are born with words flowing in their veins.

I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!

I think of my feather pen as something magical that still belongs to a wing. All I need is paper, ink, and the courage to let wild words soar.

Opinions. Ideas. Possibilities. So many! How can I choose? Between bursts of lightning-swift energy, I enjoy peaceful moments when the whole world seems to be a flowing river of verse and all I have to do is learn how to swim.

I sing without knowing what my song means, and whether the listening world is amazed or wounded.

Without even trying to be a teacher, Fredrika is teaching us, Showing us how to see things in new ways Instead of always thinking The same old thoughts That have been passed along by strangers Day after day, year after year Without any spirit of amazement Or wonder,

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

An new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.

From the time I arrived on the Cape, one of the things I chose explicitly was to put my writing first. Everything else in my life waxed and waned, but writing, I discovered during my restructuring, was my real core. Not any relationship. Not any love. Not any person. I had become more selfish and less accessible. I ceased to be the universal mommy of the tribe. I wanted to see people when I was done with my writing for the day, and not in the middle of my work time.

Where do dreams come from? ...they slink out of books, they lurk in the stacks of libraries. Out of pages turned they rise like the scent of peonies and infect the brain with their promises.

Variant selves haunt the corridors of my brain, people my novels, crowd in like ghosts drawn to blood when friends or strangers tell me secrets, hand me their troubles, sweaters knit of hair and wire.