Quotes About Creativity

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it, I did the thing in life I wanted to do - Writing.

If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line." [ Paris Review , interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

When you get to the point where you cheat for the sake of beauty, you're an artist.

Cubism is ... a picture for its own sake. Literary Cubism does the same thing in literature, using reality merely as a means and not as an end.

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.

We can't just say, "This pen is great, and consumers should buy it!" We ought to wrap up this message and create not only a convincing, but an interesting story around it. Here I am, improvising on the spot: A lady dropped her pen in the street, it was raining heavily, and a gentleman picked it up and said, "May I have your number?"

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again

it's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.

It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you.... It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it.

Your life is a minor rhapsody for flute and violin.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

In expecting to grow "old" at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish.

Henry J. Kaiser, the industrialist considered the father of American shipbuilding, attributed much of his success in business to the constructive, positive use of Creative Imagination with these words: "You can imagine your future.

success" has nothing to do with prestige symbols, but with creative accomplishment.

Schubert is said to have told a friend that his own creative process consisted in "remembering a melody" that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before.

Creative Imagination is not something reserved for the poets, the philosophers, the inventors. It enters into our every act. For imagination sets the goal "picture" that our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of "will," as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.