Quotes About Creativity

He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.

Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book.

My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily

One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat.

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.

Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.

Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.

Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

Oh take their picture," said the woman to her bemused husband, "I think they're artists." "Oh, go on," he shrugged. "They're just kids.

And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.

How quickly it had charmed me. I imagined it transformed. A place to think, make spaghetti, brew coffee, a place to write.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travelers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks.

I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

I raided libraries and church bazaars for art books. It was possible then to find beautiful volumes for next to nothing and I happily dwelt in the world of Modigliani, Dubuffet, Picasso, Fra Angelico, and Albert Ryder.

Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.