Quotes About Creativity

Optimist: Day-dreamer more elegantly spelled

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Photography is 90% sheer, brutal drudgery!

Hunger is the handmaid of genius

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

I have had a "call" to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit… seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

On the mountains mistakes are fatal. In politics, mistakes are wounding emotionally, but you recover. Personally, wilderness helps me get back in touch with natural rhythms, helps me reflect and, in the process, restore my creativity.

Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.

Great periods of poetry begin with an inordinate self-consciousness, and only gradually attain to the natural.

It's funny, because music is one of those things it is natural to go into. You hear it so much growing up, it kind of permeates you and eventually you spew out some music of your own.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.

Darkness can be funny. It can be quirky. There are different ways that that stuff comes out as a creative person. But the actual conflicted, twisted, decaying, rotting soul? That's not me. No more.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

If you're into what you're playing, that's the most important thing.