Creativity Quotes
Kerstin Gier
Hearts can't be broken because they're made of marzipan.
2984 Phil Cousineau
Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.
1523 Brian Raif
Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
1974 Karl Lagerfeld
Absurdity and anti - absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.
2643 Michael Bassey Johnson
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.
1604 Joy Fielding
Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.
1067 Jonathan Culver
If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.
3103 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.
1744 Albert Einstein
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking
1186 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.
2876 Red Haircrow
Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
2423 Deepak Chopra
Non-judgment quiets the internal dialogue, and this opens once again the doorway to creativity.
2400 Karl Lagerfeld
I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.
3380 Henry David Thoreau
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.
2676 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.
1057 Stephen King
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
3252 Kurt Vonnegut
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
2920 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.
2277 Pablo Picasso
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
2630 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.
3327 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.
2638 Mary Shelley
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.
2838 Arthur Rimbaud
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
2447 John Waters
Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
2546 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.
1568 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.
4244 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.
3256 Julio Cortázar
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
4320 Julian Barnes
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
3422 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.
3857 Brendan Francis Brown
Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.
2966 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.
3900 Jyrki Vainonen
Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
2234 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.
4366 Lawrence Clark Powell
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
2753 David Almond
And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!
3538 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!
3324 Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
2638 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.
3227 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.
2310 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.
4467 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.
1029 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.
3888 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!
3217 Arthur Holitscher
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
1277 Brenda Ueland
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.
3298 Julian Barnes
The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
2123 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.
4538 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.
4058 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.
2210 Jan Neruda
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
3470 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.
3328 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.
4516 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.
4564 Julian Barnes
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
3608 Gustave Flaubert
The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.
2624 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.
4291 W.H. Auden
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
2150 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.
3202 Brenda Ueland
Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.
2951 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.
4234 Ruth Rendell
I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.
3686 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.
3284 Christina Westover
Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.
2336 Holly Robinson
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days.
4748 Jeff Bowen
I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing.
1222 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.
1985 Jan Neruda
I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
2237 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.
1838 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.
1719 Stephen King
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
3630 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.
3357 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.
1330 Imaj
Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.
3698 Ralph Keyes
Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.
2185 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.
2720 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.
1323 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.
4164 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.
3766 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.
1289 Vera Nazarian
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.
4553 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.
3494 Kate Kearns
That tingle in the brain is called a word.
It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.
2919 Austin Kleon
Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.
1912 E.A. Bucchianeri
Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.
3479 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.
4323