Quotes About Creativity

When you do see a thing clearly in your mind, the creative Success Mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort, or "willpower.

Henri Fehr, the famous Swiss scientist, said that practically all his good ideas came to him when he was not actively engaged in work on a problem, and that most of the discoveries of his contemporaries were made when they were away from their workbench, so to speak.

Holland, a recognized authority on teaching piano, recommends that all pianists "practice in their heads." A new composition, he says, should be first gone over in the mind.

Remember the fairy story "The Elves and the Shoemaker"? The shoemaker found that if he cut out the leather, and laid out the patterns before retiring, little elves came and actually put the shoes together for him while he was sleeping.

In much the same way, when we set out to find a new idea, or the answer to a problem, we must assume that the answer exists already—somewhere—and set out to find it.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

It's not for me - religion. It seems like a redundancy for a poet.

Fashion helps people...Fashion...makes us better people. The right clothes can make you feel great. They can transform you...

I believe talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.

Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.

Women create an idealized, hopeful vision for the future to inspire other women. Fiction and fantasy are the crucial first steps to changing the world.

I was raised on comic books, and I love science fiction.