Creativity Quotes

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pain fuels artistry and creativity. Harness your suffering and become a master of your art.

~ Michelle C. Hillstrom

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

~ Mary Oliver

Creative freedom is prosperity for the soul.

~ Michele Jennae

A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What is more boundless than imagination? What is more primordial than the art of creation? To create and be creative is perhaps our most essential nature.

~ Atalina Wright

Creativity is a state of mind, a way of being, and it comes from a sacred place within.

~ Bonnie Kelso

To require perfection is to invite paralysis.

~ David Bayles

The assertion that only sex is power and the arrogation of creativity to the masculine sex and the rendering of all creativity as sexual—this is patriarchal aesthetics. Patriarchal passion sees violent sex as the essential creative act, even aesthetically, through a sort of metaphysical transubstantiation. This is their romantic belief that sex with the Master can produce the artistic spirit in the student. Male creativity is thus born in another, her work is given depth through the violent transgression of her boundaries.

~ Somer Brodribb

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

~ Kamand Kojouri

An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.

~ Marcel Proust

All great talents are never found in rich exquisite locales with perfect setting that enhance their creative works, but on the contrary are found in the most obnoxious circumstances yet are unaffected by them and create masterpieces at the most unpredictable situations, just like a lotus flower blossoming in a muddy pond!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

A good artist does not just make imaginations beautiful to the mind, but also more pleasant to the eye with a superb visible touch of excellence.

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

The harder you work, the more you produce, the more you create, the more you will be rejected. By people who never created shit.

~ Jonathan Heatt

Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.

~ Henri Bergson

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

~ Benjamin Wood

We are all creative beings. The act of creating puts us in direct connection with the greatest creator. The master artist that is our Divine Creator.

~ Eileen Anglin

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

~ Kamand Kojouri

These poems are cupsthat I pour my life into.Here, Drink!

~ Kamand Kojouri

Creativity abides no absolutes.

~ Shannon Taylor Hodnett

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

~ Jessie Burton

The true purpose of illustrated journaling [is] to celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special.

~ Danny Gregory

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

~ Kamand Kojouri

There are no bad drawings.Drawings are experiences.The more you draw, the more experienced you'll get.In fact, you'll learn more from bad or unpredictable or weird experiences than from those that go exactly as you'd hoped and planned.So let it go.Release your ego's desire for perfection.Take risks.Stretch.Grow.Create as much as you can, whenever you can.

~ Danny Gregory

There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.

~ Tom Pappalardo

She was in awe of all his work. 'How do you do it? she asked.He smiled and said, 'By loving you.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Birds sing, wolves howl, crickets chirp. But why? Money? Fame? Record contracts? Endorsements? What's it all for? They do it because they're alive. They do it because life is about making things.

~ Danny Gregory

Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence.

~ Young-Ha Kim

Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises

~ Richard Flanagan

Creativity is the brain's invisible muscle -- that when used and excercised routinely -- becomes better and stronger.

~ Ashley Ormon

The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.

~ Andrew Wilson

I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.

~ Jessie Burton

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

~ Julia Cameron