Quotes About Creativity

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.

Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?

It seems so to me, said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.

imagination WAS the eagle that devoured Prometheus!

Chi ama le idee non è destinato a morire di fame.

But least is he who, with enchanted eyes Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian's perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.

Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette.

Courage is about the most useful thing in an artist's outfit.

Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm.

What is originality in art? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not and this may be done by saying that it is never a willful rejection of what has been accepted as the necessary laws of various forms of art. Thus in reasoning originality relies not in discarding the necessary laws of thought, but in using them to express new intellectual conceptions. In poetry originality consists not in discarding the necessary laws of rhythm but in finding new rhythms within the limits of those laws.

The mind of man possesses a sort of creative power on its own; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order. This power is called imagination.

A]rt can never give the rules that make an art.

The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....

At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.

Edison averaged one patent for every ten to twelve days of his adult life.

Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy.

A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.

A poet," he liked to say, "can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.

Someone said a writer should read three times more than he or she writes.

I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.

The poet must steal fire from the heavens.