Quotes About Creativity

When I fiddle around with their amps, it's because it needs to be done. I must be hearing it different to them. But you'd be surprised by how many people tell me that it works. Not that I need telling. I know it works.

Copying lies at the heart of creativity.

Writing is hard. It's tough to get up in the morning and look at the white snowfield of a trackless page. How to push forward? Use anger; use rage if you have to. Settle scores. And if you have no scores to settle, then create a few for yourself, not only for the purposes of public relations, but also for the purposes of inspiration. Hot-blooded, hot-tempered, always ready to take offense: the writer as duelist.

Browning calls the poet God's spy and that's a complimentary way of putting it. We could say, more neutrally, that writers are almost always spies and have the kinds of lives that spying creates. They are constantly collecting information, making mental notes.

Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

In spite of what many teachers of 'creative thinking' say, the best way to be creative is not to try to think without limits but to very carefully define what those limits should be.

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.

If man could apply half the ingenuity he's exhibited in the creation of weapons to more sensible ends, there's no limit to what he might yet accomplish

These people work hard and do their best, and they want the world to acknowledge that they're intelligent, valuable, and creative.

Years ago, for instance, I realized that most of the CEOs and managers I meet are not just smart but also wise—but they don't often get a chance to share their wisdom. They're focused so intently on the mundane day-to-day problems of running a business that they rarely have the opportunity to think deeply and creatively and use their highest and usually considerable intellectual abilities.

A cartoonist creates his whole universe without any input.

It's a lot easier to do good work when you have good words to say and work with good people.

You do have to try, learn, and improve. You do have to put yourself out there and risk failure. But in this new world, you don't have to go bankrupt if you fail because you can fail small. You can innovate as a hobby. Imagine that: a nation of innovation hobbyists working to make their lives more meaningful and the world a better place. Welcome to the maker revolution.

To develope [sic] the powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight.

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule." Clarence Birdseye

images can bring hopefulness.

And so Lennon-McCartney stood shoulder to shoulder as equals, connected at every level, their considerable talents harmonized, their personalities meshed, their drive unchecked, their goal in focus. They were a union, stronger than the sum of their parts, and everything was possible.

Expelled from the art institute for, among other reasons, drawing nudes as a single straight line, à la Cocteau, he was a young man of 21 well versed in "acts of a rebellion against the squares.

freedom of expression is great for art, but lousy for engineering.

Because writing teaches writers to write, this

bypasses the accumulation of traditional cultural capital (that is, a relatively rarefied knowledge of great authors and their works) in favor of a more immediate identification with the charisma of authorship.