Quotes About Creativity

keep your hand moving

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

I was so young, and making movies, going to the studio every morning at dawn was magic.

the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

Even now, when I try and think of band names just randomly, I'm so thankful that 'fun.' is the name of the band. I never really think twice about it. It is so simple and so easy.

As a songwriter I hate this whole, 'If it's a sad song, it has to sound like a sad song thing.' And that goes all the way back to my days with the Format. I'm an insane narcissist, so if I have to get something off my chest, I'll get something off my chest.

Drama is imagination limited by logic. Mathematics is logic limited by imagination.

'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.

It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.

[On the Hollywood studio system:] A sargasso of the imagination!

He was giving birth to groups of words.

Art Is One if Life's Richest Offerings. For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation.

His mouth formed an O with lips torn angry in laying duck's eggs from a chicken's rectum.

Creative Copying: He also returned to his earlier practice of copying other artists' works. Apart from the fact that it could be done indoors, copying was a way of learning, and although he was now a great master (without fully recognizing the fact), Van Gogh's urge to learn remained very strong.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing second, the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly, the solid cash.

I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.

Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.

What any experimental art is trying to get you to do is move beyond your preconceptions and your expectations regarding what should be happening, what's going to happen, what kinds of effects it should have, and enter a liminal state in which those things can be redefined in the way that the particular artist or piece of art is proposing.