Quotes About Creativity

Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor.

"Only a novel"… in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

You see, in the morning I always practice imagination for an hour or two. It does me lots of good.

Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.

I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary, I am the organizer, I am the maid, and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling.

I think I made good movies.

For if my poems have always been about survival--and I believe they have been--then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.

I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind.

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

It was assumed that genre films could not have any artistic merit, because the were not original works and because they were not authored works. These standards of evaluation are based upon a romantic theory of art that places the highest value on the concepts of originality, person creativity, and the idea of individual artist as genius.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

From my hand,

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

over 19,000 haiku about Spam—"Spamku"—have to this date been posted online.