Creativity Quotes

Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.

Gather quicklyOut of darknessAll the songs you knowAnd throw them at the sunBefore they meltLike snow.

Disneyland is not just another amusement park. It's unique, and I want it kept that way. Besides, you don't work for a dollar - you work to create and have fun.

Imitation is the homage mediocrity pays to greatness.

I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

It wasn't until I hung out with Dead Prez and understood how to make, you know, raps with a message sound cool that I was able to just write "All Falls Down" in 15 minutes.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction.

I think all poems are commissioned. They just come to me without somebody outside commissioning them. The idea comes and I will live with them 'til I get it as close to what I mean. I've never been totally satisfied. I've come close a few times.

Life is a lot more fun if you treat its challenges in creative ways.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.

We are the sons of Sorrow; we are the poets and the prophets and the musicians.

The most genius thing about the way I create is to create with other geniuses.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?

One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

You see things and you say, 'Why?'. But I dream things and I say, 'Why not?'.

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.

No matter what your work, let it be your own. No matter what your occupation, let what you are doing be organic. Let it be in your bones. In this way, you will open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you.

Women alone stir my imagination.

Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.

You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.

Music... is the shaping of the invisible.

Perhaps...the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Art is evidence of our most creative moment.

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

Working on a novel is very solitary and I get to be the boss. I'm the dictator, so I win every battle. So, in that sense, novels are easier because you don't have to answer to anyone. And then, you go into something like film and there are more cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

Real work is completed in silence and strikes a chord in the minds of only a very few.

I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.

It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

I'm interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Look sharply after your own thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say-but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds my lie between you and its return.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.

You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.

I've always seen it to be a privilege to make movies. It's a really expensive, creative medium.

Everything worthwhile is a good idea, but did you ever notice there is more bad ideas that will work than there is good ones?

Inspiration gives no warnings.

It is always better to be an original than an imitation.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

Write what you love and love what you write.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.