Quotes About Creativity

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.

Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is.

It was sort of like the way writers had long been pillaging all the good phrases from Shakespeare plays for the titles of their novels, so the only phrases still available meant nothing. Soon, Emmett thought, people would be writing novels called Enter, Guard .

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn't do it any longer.

But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place.

The Ishtar of cartoons," wrote the Reporter. Every failure was the Ishtar of something

There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.

If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you'd meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I'd tried.

Male novelists made up words in their fiction: "phallomaterialism"; "ero-tectonics.

Plus, constantly worrying about money is *boring*. Use your brain...to be creative.

Does [your music] have to be a job? And as for your actual job...do you have to think of [it] as a consolation prize? ...What if you just *played*? Isn't it possible you'd also like your job more, because you wouldn't think of it as something that's secretly had to replace this other thing?

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

Obviously, there's the seedy side of the strip club world and pole dancing. But, pole dancing, as an art form, is really beautiful. It's been hyper-sexualized because it's associated with strippers, but if you think about it, just in terms of other kinds of dancing, they're using an instrument to create these amazing dance forms.

I've invented it, because there is no other word that celebrates the genius that is me.

The earth had set me free. The city was at my feet. I forgot where I was and that I had not touched a pencil in months.

It wasn't just her words, it was her way of putting them together, the voice that seemed to gain power with each one, so that my head had been filled with images so magically vibrant it was as if I had seen them with my own eyes. She changed the world into something fine. She made one believe.

It was my favorite characteristic of musicians. They were competitive and jealous, but unlike poets or writers or painters, musicians borrowed and built upon old foundations and acknowledged the genius of before. They used it. One discovered, and others embraced, embroidered, and embellished, twisting and shaping it into something that was quite their own, even as it held echoes of the past.