Quotes About Creation

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look... To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a

Along the timeline of history, God has used people with purpose as partners in His Big Plan. As a result of being made in His likeness,2 we have a gnawing need to matter. It's a sense of purpose that comes from being one of His created works of art. He meant these purposes to be developed and realized.

Our God was made by men, sculptured by savages who did the best they could. They made our God somewhat like themselves, and gave to him their passions, their ideas of right and wrong.

We waste time searching for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

Every vegetable, every bit of protein on the list had a provenance more complex than a minor Rembrandt.

only one deaf God, who cannot see, remains—claiming all of creation as His own. If people would invest one hundredth of their devotion to this God in the living brothers and sisters amongst whom they stand, we might have a chance of surviving one another. As it is...

the need to create is a drive that lies deep within each of us. We all strive to build empires, whether of stone or people or words. Empires we hope will survive us. In the end, though, each of us must necessarily leave our creations behind. All we can hope for is to also leave behind a worthy successor to continue our work. Or who can at least maintain it for a season.

To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

Making stuff is easy. Selling it is not.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.

This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I've learned that it isn't necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It's a game, right? It's like being paid for dreaming.

The Divine was beyond description, beyond knowing, beyond comprehension. To say that the Divine was Creation divided by Destruction was as close as one could come to definition. But the puny of soul, the dull of wit, weren't content with that. They wanted to hang a face on the Divine. They went so far as to attribute petty human emotions (anger, jealousy, etc) to it, not stopping to realize that if God were a being, even a supreme being, our prayers would have bored him to death long ago.

Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

If there's a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn't exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn't have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that's it. That's all an artist does.

I have learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that a) people are never perfect, but love can be, b) that is the one and only way that they mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay?

The function of the artist,' the Navajo answered, 'is to provide what life does not.