Quotes About Creativity

We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.

I want them to think of being in church as being in the middle of a work of art, a collective witness of fellow human beings, wherever they are and whatever they're up to.

an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.

To interpret dots in the sky as white-hot, million-kilometre spheres, one must first have thought of the idea of such spheres. And then one must explain why they look small and cold and seem to move in lockstep around us and do not fall down. Such ideas do not create themselves, nor can they be mechanically derived from anything: they have to be guessed – after which they can be criticized and tested.

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What

My pencil and I are more clever than I.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good

After all, computers play chess mindlessly – by exhaustively searching the consequences of all possible moves – but humans achieve a similar-looking functionality in a completely different way, by creative and enjoyable thought.

The art and culture that is New York, communications, finance, all these things help make up New York. The rest of the country should be happy that we are what we are.

Nothing's boring if it's in your soul…

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

Your father may never have produced one of those stuffy tomes we call great literature, but he left the world a substantial collection of delightful adventure stories.

If you're a perfectionist about your writing, [your rough draft] is the time to get over it. . . . Decide ahead of time that your rough draft is going to be pretty awful, and join the ranks of the great writers of the world. . . . Save the niceties for the revision stage.

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

If we could be participants in, rather than creators of, our lives, we'd let go of most of the judgements, critiques, fears, and doubts that keep us from loving life.

I don't care how famous a guitarist is, he ain't learned everything. There's always somewhere to go, something to mash up, but he ain't found it yet. You never learn everything on that guitar neck.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

Les mots n'ont pas toujours besoin d'une destination. On les laisse s'arrêter aux frontières des sensations. Errant sans tête dans l'espace du trouble. Et c'est bien là le privilège des artistes : vivre dans la confusion.

Words do not always need a destination. We can leave them behind us at the borders of feelings. Running around headless in the vague zone. And that is the privilege of artists: to live in confusion.

existe una violencia peor que el dolor de que no lo publiquen a uno: ¡que te publiquen y no salgas del más absoluto anonimato!

Seguramente se sentiría muy orgullosa de haber sido la compañera del hombre que había escrito aquella novela; siempre podría decir que ella había sido su inspiración. No hay edad para empezar a ejercer de musa.

Los escritores están fatal de la cabeza, todo el mundo lo sabe. Y los que no publican deben ser peores aún.