Quotes About Creation

Don't tear anything up: it creates blanks, silences—like the dashes of [Paul] Valéry.

Listen, if there are only two men in the world and one woman life is worth creating . . . there is life. The three of us can fight the tide of Spengler's asphyxiating gas—pessimism.

What you are trying to do is a piece of art that is perfect in itself as art and yet retains the imperfection, the human fragmented, chaotic characteristics of a diary written on the spot in white heat. I don't know whether it can be done. It's a problem.

We need only to sharpen up the implements. I can see you giving birth to books in rapid succession. I believe in you enormously—I was genuinely stirred—also exasperated.

Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me." "I feel doomed to

You ought to write my books. How can anybody do anything in three weeks? To do that one must be a god. God took a week to create the world. I take my hat off to him too. It's stupendous. Unbelievable. Let it stay that way.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. The world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign & re-create myself…

There is no doubt that the act of creation is very similar to the act of dreaming. The difference is that it includes an activity which has been difficult to analyze. It is not only the power to summon an image, but the power to compose with this image. The second faculty, the faculty of active creation, is what is missing from the use of drugs. Drugs induce passivity. Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

In chaos, there is fertility.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Mountains are not stadiums where I statisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.... I go to them as humans go to worship. From their lofty summits I view my past, dream of the future and, with an unusual acuity, am allowed to experience the present moment.... my vision cleared, my strength renewed. In the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn

Le bonheur n'est pas une chose; c'est une pensée. Ce n'est pas un fait; c'est une invention. Ce n'est pas un état; c'est une action. Disons le mot: le bonheur est création.[...] C'est une praxis, disait- Aristote, et point une poiésis.

Est un être humain tout être né de deux êtres humains

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

Art begins with resistance—at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, seeing that his work was good.

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

El recuerdo es una invención desdichada.

Ces sculptures-là, l'homme qui les a faites, il aimait ce qu'il faisait. Moi, ici, j'ai toujours été contre ce qui est destruction. Les curés, bien sûr, je ne suis pas d'accord ; les églises, j'ai rien contre. Moi, j'ai mon idée, je trouve qu'on devrait en faire des théâtres : c'est riche, on entend bien....

The power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it.

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

Substitution . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.