Quotes About Creativity

An artist is a conduit for a vision that is as uniquely her own as a fingerprint, and unrecognizable until it appears.

My block was due to two overlapping factors: laziness and lack of discipline. If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don't want to write, do something else. It's as simple as that.

A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

How can you tell when a piece is finished?'I asked. 'You can't,' he said flatly. 'All you can tell is when you can't do any more to it. And then you need to stop because if you don't, you will spoil it.

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.

Children often sang, adults seldom. At what age did the singing stop?

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.

He'd died his blond hair purple in honor of his best friend's wedding, and he wore skinny white jeans, a red shirt, and

For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.

For every failure, there's an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

Our humor turns our anger into a fine art.

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.

When many story-tellers occupy themselves with a social world which offers no great variety of lively action, their stories will probably resemble one another as to many of the major incidents, and if they draw on these limited resources like spend thrifts such resemblances will be inevitable--and therefore not significant.

Jane Austen never repeats herself.

The outlines of birds and beasts and sailing ships could still be seen in the apothecary's attic in Grantham, along with the drawings of men and mathematical symbols. But the boy who who had made them was gone. He had taken his notebook with him: his secret world of star names and tawny lions and golden ink made from quicksilver.

Elise said she had something to show her. It was a set of beautifully painted cutout paper fairies.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

Rodin was on the brink of a grand passion. But unlike Bernhardt's, his lover would become the greatest inspiration of his career. Her name was Camille Claudel, and if she was not pretty in a conventional way, she was as beautiful and alive as quicksilver. She was also an extraordinarily gifted sculptor in her own right.

That one doesn't paint a landscape, a seascape, a figure; one paints the effect of a time of day on a landscape, a seascape, or a figure.

When the struggling young painter Rodolphe Salis opened Le Chat Noir in 1881, he had no idea that he was about to make history.