Quotes About Creativity

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

So what it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that we need to support the arts in schools, and at every other level in the education of children.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.

Music is not just the black dots on the white paper -- it's what happens when those black dots go into your heart, and come out again.

But his very best questions always popped out of his mind, unprepared, never having been written down in advance because they were the angle he picked up on the fly, as he heard an answer to a lesser question. Those creative questions were the art. It is what, in my mind, made his querying great.

The sustaining interest and enthusiasm of many friends and colleagues are, of course, the nutrition that every writer needs, and can never adequately acknowledge.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.

Richard took to putting crime-scene photographs on the walls of his cell, using soap and toothpaste as glue. He'd gotten the photographs, which were part of the discovery, from Daniel Hernandez.

Ultimately, the purpose of magic is to free our potential, not bind us to ideas.

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.

Time even influenced postmodern artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Dalí. Picasso and Braque's cubist style, for instance, depicts people and objects as they exist from all perspectives simultaneously, while Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory depicts the malleability and relativity of time.

The fastest way to write is to pretend you have all the time in the world.

movimiento Fluxus.

En el mundo de la pintura, todos esperaban innovaciones e ideas nuevas, pero, en el mundo de la música, con un entorno mucho más conservador, no había espacio para las nuevas ideas. El mundo de la música seguía obsesionado por una «música moderna» que tenía más de cincuenta años. Aquella reflexión supuso para mí un momento de liberación.

If you don't know what to do, there's actually a chance of doing something new.

If you don't know what to do, there's actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you're doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

an authentic personal style cannot be achieved without a solid technique at its base.

In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.

As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.

the point of writing music and experiencing music isn't to make people comfortable necessarily

If the opening chapters of Genesis portray God as a creative artist, then it only stands to reason that the people he made in his image will also be artists. Art is an imaginative activity, and in the act of creating, we reflect the mind of our Maker.