Creativity Quotes

Write like you have many readers.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.

~ Steven Pressfield

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

~ Oscar Wilde

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

~ Sylvia Plath

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take the

~ Jim Jarmusch

Doors are for people with no imagination.

~ Derek Landy

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

~ Ken Robinson

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so thatwithout the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

~ Pearl S. Buck

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

~ Anaïs Nin

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

~ Sophia Loren

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

~ John Steinbeck

You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.

~ Andy Warhol

If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.

~ Austin Kleon

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be pat

~ Hilary Mantel

Chance favors the prepared mind.

~ Louis Pasteur

Mr. Freeman sighs. No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.

~ Criss Jami

The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

~ Charles Baudelaire

But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

~ Madeleine L'engle

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

~ Ray Bradbury

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

~ Steve Martin

Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.

~ Criss Jami

When you have wit of your own, it's a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.

~ Criss Jami

Keeing busy is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.

~ Jim Butcher

Routine kills creative thought.

~ Scarlett Thomas

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

~ Rollo May

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever

~ Anna Quindlen

look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you...

~ Colette

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

~ Arthur Koestler

Originality is the best form of rebellion.

~ Mike Sasso

Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

~ Ken Robinson

Creative power is mightier than its possessor.

~ C.g. Jung

Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.

~ Ester Buchholz

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. (...) Boredom opens up the space, for new engagements. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are.

~ Slavoj Žižek

Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.

~ John O'donohue