Quotes About Creativity

After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins

At Linus Pauling's sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, "Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?" He replied, "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

The conventional explanation is that Raphael, Mendel, and Bach were always creative, only their reputation changed with the vagaries of social recognition. But the systems model recognizes the fact that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition. Mendel was not creative during his years of relative obscurity because his experimental findings were not that important until a group of British geneticists, at the end of the nineteenth century, recognized their implications for evolution.

make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture? Or will it be a wild thing which only seemed exciting while you were sitting in the studio alone? Will it look like something? Can you actually do it physically? Can you, personally, do it physically? What do you have by way of materials? So the second part is a lot of hard work.

Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.

creative people usually enjoy not only their work but also the many other activities in their lives.

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present.

The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real, and create a new reality.

Robert Galvin says that creativity consists of anticipation and commitment. Anticipation involves having a vision of something that will become important in the future before anybody else has it; commitment is the belief that keeps one working to realize the vision despite doubt and discouragement.

When a field becomes too self-referential and cut off from reality, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. It is often dissatisfaction with the rigidity of domains that makes great creative advances possible.

a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a light-bulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.

Creativity testing owes its existence to World War II, when the air force commissioned J. P. Guilford, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, to study the subject. The air force wanted to select pilots who in an emergency—the unexpected failure of a gear or instrument—would respond with appropriately original behavior, saving themselves and the plane.

One of the values in walking to work is mental meandering. Or if driving, not to have the car radio on. Now I don't think of myself as necessarily especially creative, but this creativity has to be a profoundly wasteful process. And that mental meandering, mind wandering and so on, is an essential process.

If one reads the biographies of physicists like Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrashekhar, and Bethe, one gets the impression that without hikes in the mountains and the vision of night skies their science would not have amounted to much.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.

Suuri kirjailija on ennen kaikkea kertoja ja kuvaaja. Muista nämä. Suuri kirjailija ei ole koskaan saarnaaja, hosuja tai maailmanparantaja.

Saat olla kiihkeä ja tulinen, mutta kiihkosi ja tulesi on valauduttava kiinteään, vakuuttavasti taiteelliseen muotoon, muuten se merkitsee vain sohimista. Harkinnan ja rauhan alta kuultava kiihkeys tekee voimakkaamman vaikutuksen kuin holtiton tunteittensa purkaminen

If rules make a framework for the mind to climb about in, why should the mind not climb right out?

It's not the "hows" you're to be concerned with, but the "Wows!"—as long as there's understanding!

Every good author has a trick, a great and mighty trick.

None of us knew how to come back from this moment. This was where the script ended and we all had to improvise.

The worst thing I could be thinking is how could I be a cool bass player.

I'm always interested in mixing technology and music. You know, maybe I'll have a MIDI bass pickup at some point, I don't really think that's the direction I would want to go.