Creativity Quotes

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.

~ Heraclitus

If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

~ Leonard Bernstein

All good work requires self-revelation.

~ Sidney Lumet

Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.

~ Keri Smith

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

~ John Cleese

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

~ Peter S. Beagle

The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.

~ Robert Greene

Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.

~ Deb Caletti

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

~ Leonard Bernstein

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain.

~ Nikola Tesla

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of green?

~ Stan Brakhage

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

~ Maya Angelou

You can’t keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it’ll run away and find a new pimp.

~ George Meyer

It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

The purposeful destruction of information is the essence of intelligent work.

~ Ray Kurzweil

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

~ Alice Walker

DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist?EA: It didn't -- it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth.

~ Emilie Autumn

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

~ Hugh Macleod

Let the blood and the bruises define your legacy.

~ Lady Gaga

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Every one who has taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it that makes a difference.

~ Nolan Bushnell

A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

~ Irvin D. Yalom

You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

~ Humphrey Carpenter

The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

~ Katherine Mansfield

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

~ John Barth

You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I'm creating an imaginary — it's always imaginary — world in which I would like to

~ William S. Burroughs

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.

~ Frédéric Chopin

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard

~ Michael Michalko

If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case. So dust off your horn and start tooting.

~ Hugh Macleod

The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.

~ Saul Steinberg

You can have anything you want so long as you realise that you can't have everything you want.

~ Orna Ross

What if the very reason you were created was to be creative?

~ Michelle Dennis Evans

They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?

~ Hugh Macleod

The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.

~ Vilayat Inayat Khan

If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

~ Quentin Crisp