Quotes About Creativity

Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed? Childhood is a lie of poetry.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies.

The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene. He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need.

Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. The condition I describe is not extraordinary. Certain scientists, philosophers, historians, and many mathematicians do the same, advancing their causes as they can. One must be satisfied with that.

Nipples may be said to resemble the ripest of raspberries or perhaps even a thimble, but "why take the trouble when the trouble taken is so evident," though Gass himself is willing to do it and make it look effortless. Maybe they really look like "the lightly chewed ends of large pencil erasers," and for someone who spends his days at his desk that image can prove surprisingly effective.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I'm sure I have a process, but it mostly takes place in my dreams.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works, have done so without knowing how or why. The greatest power operates unseen.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

The path of genius is free, and its own

He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.

George Bernard Shaw's famous spelling of "fish" as "ghoti"—the first two letters pronounced as the last two in "tough," the middle letter as in "women," and the last two as in "nation.

The schools turn wonder into drudgery and uniqueness into aberration. Acceptance by the dulled others becomes worth almost any surrender, and nothing is worth the price of solitude: to read, to ponder, to paint, to pray. In the new Plato's cave, we have the electronic shadows to make the unreal true and to give us an ersatz peace — even though every ad ever produced is deliberately formulated to make us unhappy.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly like have a car that flies like have furniture that is alive.

To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.

you know, a daydream properly utilized can be the most powerful force in the universe. One need only dream of freedom to begin to break the spell of enslavement.