Quotes About Creativity

Why does God call people to be artists? Because he is an Artist, and we are made in his image. When we first meet the God of the Bible, he is busy making things and calling them good. Thus it is only natural for him to take some of the people that he has made, call them to be artists, and hold them to an aesthetic standard.

In Exodus 31 God sanctifies a wide spectrum of artistic gifts by blessing "all kinds of craftsmanship.

A Christian view of art thus stands in opposition to the postmodern assumption that there are no absolutes.

Yet even Christians who are dismissive of art continue to use it. Doing so is inescapable. Every time we build a sanctuary, arrange furniture in a room, or produce a brochure, we are making artistic decisions. Even if we are not artists in our primary vocation, there is an inescapably artistic aspect to our daily experience.

Artists are called and gifted-personally, by name-to write, paint, sing, play, and dance to the glory of God.

Moses was a prophet, but the tabernacle needed an artist.

The composer Igor Stravinsky wisely said, "I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received."3

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

One doesnt write about anything. One just writes.

I hate vacations. If you can build buildings, why sit on the beach?

ARCHITECTURE, n The art of how to waste space.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

What's that got to do with it?" Sam said. "A humorist is a man whose soul is black, black, but who turns his curdles of darkness into explosions of light. But when the light dies out, the black returns.

You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

There is bad in all good authors

A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.