Creativity Quotes

Kerstin Gier

Hearts can't be broken because they're made of marzipan.

Jorge Luis Borges

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Phil Cousineau

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

Brian Raif

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

E.A. Bucchianeri

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

Karl Lagerfeld

Absurdity and anti - absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.

Michael Bassey Johnson

The sub-conscious mind is so powerful in such a way that even if you empty your
The sub-conscious mind is so powerful in such a way that even if you empty your mind of all its components, there will be a little thought; it is synonymous to a well informed person who can never be deformed.

Courtland Kusmierz

The Hands create, what the Heart feels!

Bryant McGill

The master creators are masters of love.

Joy Fielding

Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.

Miles Davis

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

Jonathan Culver

If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.

Coco Chanel

There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.

Albert Einstein

Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. Albert Einstein
Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

Albert Einstein

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. Albert Einstein
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking

Hugh MacLeod

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.

Red Haircrow

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

Deepak Chopra

Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.

Karl Lagerfeld

I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.

Henry David Thoreau

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Alan Moore

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.

Stephen King

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Bernard Branson

Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.. Bernard Branson
Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.

Kurt Vonnegut

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down..
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Lady Gaga

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

Pablo Picasso

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Gustave Flaubert

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.. Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Akira Kurosawa

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

Austin Kleon

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

Mary Shelley

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

Arthur Rimbaud

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

John Waters

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

Chris Baty

A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It's a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to creative pursuits.

Jimi Hendrix

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

Gustave Flaubert

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

Lois McMaster Bujold

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

Julio Cortázar

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Julian Barnes

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

J.K. Rowling

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

Gustave Flaubert

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Brendan Francis Brown

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

SARK

Create a guidebook of creative dreams

You can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others.

Jyrki Vainonen

Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.

E.B. White

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

Lawrence Clark Powell

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

David Almond

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Roman Payne

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Julian Barnes

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

SARK

Identifying Your Dream

Some people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.

Khaled Hosseini

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

Gertrude Stein

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Gustave Flaubert

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don't keep space in your head for writing, you won't write even if you have the time.

Paul Valéry

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Charles Baudelaire

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

A.M. Riley

Arrogance kills creativity.

Arthur Holitscher

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

Brenda Ueland

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

Julian Barnes

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

Julian Barnes

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

SARK

Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.

Eudora Welty

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Jan Neruda

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

Roman Payne

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.

Thomas Hardy

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

Brenda Ueland

Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.

Julian Barnes

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Gustave Flaubert

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

Julia Cameron

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

W.H. Auden

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Hugh MacLeod

You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

Brenda Ueland

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

Robert McKee

When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.

Ruth Rendell

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

Hugh MacLeod

If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

Christina Westover

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

Holly Robinson

Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days.

Jeff Bowen

I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing.

Julian Barnes

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Jan Neruda

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

Chila Woychik

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.

Stephen King

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Aberjhani

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Truman Capote

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Imaj

Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.

Ralph Keyes

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

Richard Matheson

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.

A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

Sebastyne Young

The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.

Ivan Klíma

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Julian Barnes

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Jacques Vaché

Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.

Jonathan Harnisch

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark - the perfect time for creativity.

Vera Nazarian

The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make
The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.

Stephen King

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Lineation can make your break your poems.

Kate Kearns

That tingle in the brain is called a word.
It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.

Austin Kleon

Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.

E.A. Bucchianeri

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

Maurice Blanchot

The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.

Share Page