Quotes About Creativity

I used to try to draw my girlfriends. I think one of the most romantic things that anybody can do is draw a portrait of the person you love.

Music not only saved my life, it gave me a life

I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature. She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition.

I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts babe we know it, that you weren't much of a muse, but then, I weren't much of a poet.

Do you want to know how to write a song? Songwriting is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key - putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don't know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle and again you wait and you watch. And if that doesn't do it, you shoot the clown.

The creative impulse, to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things, pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It's the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go. It's not the other way around. You're not leading it.

You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing

I'd say, be careful what you wish for; certitude is seldom good for creativity.

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.

I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts know it That you weren't much of a muse, but then I weren't much of a poet

If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!

I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.

You've got to understand your limitations. It's your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster you most probably are.

Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.

Writers write badly when they have something to hide.

when I die I'll meet my characters in heaven. And they won't be made at me . . ." Nick Cole Probably the coolest quote from an author I have ever heard!

Then again, the world had ended. So maybe it was time for adults to talk about building castles again.

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don't ever rush into print.

could never get anything going in Toronto, never even got one gig with a band. So I moved instead towards acoustic music and immediately became very introspective and musically inward. That's the beginning of that whole side of my music.

First, I always go for the key, then I go for the rhythm, then I go for the melody, then I go for the lyrics, OK? That's how I do it.