Quotes About Creativity

In order to get [Mean Streets] made I had to learn how to make a movie," says Scorsese. "I didn't learn how to make a movie in film school. What you learned in film school was to express yourself with pictures and sound. But learning to make a movie is totally different.

Watching Nicholson talking Towne was like listening to Bob Dylan playing with the Band.

than these people now who want to be directors, who have done nothing but look at movies since they were eight years old, who have never had an experience in their lives. Or experienced any culture beyond movie culture.

Okay. But, he didn't do anything to hurt people. OW: Well, he destroyed [Erich] von Stroheim, as a man and as an artist. Literally destroyed him. And von Stroheim at that moment was, I think, demonstrably the most gifted director in Hollywood. Von Stroheim was the greatest argument against the producer. He was so clearly a genius, and so clearly should have been left alone—no matter what crazy thing he did—

A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.

The life of a play begins and ends in the moment of performance. This is where author, actors and directors express all they have to say. If the event has a future, this can only lie in the memories of those who were present and who retained a trace in their hearts. This is the only place for our Dream. No form nor interpretation is for ever. A form has to become fixed for a short time, then it has to go. As the world changes, there will and must be new and totally unpredictable Dreams.

Theatre is always a self-destructive art, and it is always written on the wind.

Balzac clearly is haunted by these Faustian figures, who seek to go beyond what is permitted to ordinary humans, only to reach an impasse where their very medium of expression is blocked or destroyed.

There is no resting place; you have to keeping trying to get it all down on the page. Silence threatens: as for Balzac's fictional Dante, writing is a constant skirmish with nothingness.

Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against creative thinking is a false choice

When Michelangelo finally completed painting over 400 life size figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all.

When Michelangelo finally completed painting over 400 life size figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he is reported to have written, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all." What appeared to his admirers to have flowed from sheer genius had required four torturous years of work and dedication.20

Notwithstanding the pitfalls of standardized testing, what we really ought to ask is how to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don't have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg and two colleagues put it, "one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply."12

Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one's knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one's creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house.

Happy people make good food and fashion.

Le persone felici cucinano bene e creano cose eleganti. Chi è felice non ha voglia di mangiare carne in scatola e frattaglie tritate. Ha voglia di mettere un vestito che gli doni, non scarpe vecchie e golfoni. Forse lo stato d'animo non influisce sul clima, ma non è detto.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.

I met a man at a party. He said "I'm writing a novel" I said "Oh really? Neither am I.

To reach beyond what you are you must ignore the rules and fashions of the day. Or perhaps better yet cast them way out in your peripheral vision where you can still see them but only as a vague reference point. This doesn't mean that all the rules are gone. It might mean that you adopt a far tighter code of conduct to ensure the necessary level of intensity and adventure.

I do feel like I have important, beautiful things to say about the world, I just can't think of them at this particular instant.

I feel pretty good about it so far, but it's been a little harder to write than I'd hoped.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.