Quotes About Creativity

And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap.

Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.

I rationalized that there are only so many notes and therefore only so many combination of notes, so it stood to reason that there are so many songs.

And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board

It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

I fuck like an overturned guppy.

Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ–S, XJ8, E–Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.

Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations.

Most couples have songs they call their own. We had books. Authors. Artists. Silent movies.

When I was ten, I spent a long night burrowed under my comforter, cuddled up with Funshine Bear, who, filled with a foamy enigmatic sense of language and a Bloomian dogmatism, was the most literary of the Care Bears and my harshest critic.

It's funny I want to write a poem.

The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.

The impossibility of failure is one of the weaknesses of daydreaming.

the most common pleasures involve experiences that don't really exist, as when we read novels, go to movies, play video games, and daydream. They are pleasures of the imagination. This is how we spend most of our time—Netflix without the chill.

This withdrawal from the day's turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It is a necessity, because it tries to provide the conditions wherein we are able to yield ourselves to intuitive leadings, promptings, warnings, teachings, and counsels and also to the inspiring peace of the soul. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions.

Experience shows that if a sufficiently deep level--not necessarily the deepest level but one that corresponds to what the yogis call savikalpa samadhi, which is not as deep as nirvikalpa--if that can be attained and then prolonged sufficiently in time, an artist or a writer can draw from the experience creative power for his work.

John Quincy Adams strove to escape commonplace thoughts.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.

Painting from nature is not copying the object it is realizing one's sensations.

The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed [in a painting], will set off a revolution.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.