Creativity Quotes

You came here because we do this better than you and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.

~ Don Draper

Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

~ Quentin Crisp

Like so many creative men of his school he was hounded by an incessant,restlessness.

~ Leon Uris

Be not afraid of being called un-fashionable.

~ Adolf Loos

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

~ Donald Miller

One of the strangest things is the act of creation.You are faced with a blank slate—a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instr

~ Vera Nazarian

I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.

~ W.b. Yeats

But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.

~ Ed Catmull

Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just brings into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And when all else seems lost and steeped in hopelessness, the magic of creativity can still keep you going. For when all else seem dark, an urge to create something would still give you an aim to look forward to. And if you just take hold of this urge, it will take hold of you and see you through even the darkest times. Like it did to me.

~ Jyoti Arora

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.

~ Lawrence Lessig

Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.

~ Walter Isaacson

Creativity is fragile; if you don't nurture it, it can die, leaving you recycling old ideas and pretending they're fresh. It's a sure road to mediocrity.

~ Lee Silber

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

~ James Webb Young

Own your creativity. You are creative with the same juice that flows in all of life. The question is not whether you are creative enough but whether you will free yourself to express it.

~ Ian Roberts

Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor.Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something.But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.

~ Vera Nazarian

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

~ Aberjhani

Many articles and books on creativity encourage us to 'think out of the box' and get rid of all the restrictions on our thinking. The trouble with this advice is that it is almost entirely wrong. It is very difficult to be creative when 'anything goes' and you have no limitations, because it is the limitations that actually encourage creativity.

~ Mark Forster

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, since it was made of things not in this world, it was so strong nothing in the world could break it.

~ Ingri D'aulaire

Almost nothing beautiful or brilliant happens unless a person has thought about it a lot.

~ Eric Maisel

Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, everyone births things into reality.

~ Margaret Ann Lembo

It turns out that indecision is a path itself; but figuratively, a vertical path - up or down - meaning it isn't always a fruitless path. One is forgotten, but the other is glorified. To be what they call 'middle-of-the-road' in most cases just means you have a hard time figuring out who between options is dumber. So quite often those who refused to decide were, after all, the bold individuals, the influential ones, the creative ones, those who snatched their own authority.

~ Criss Jami

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

~ Max Mckeown

What would you do if you saw something nobody else could see?”The tape gun fell out of Luke’s hand, and hit the tiled hearth. He knelt to pick it up, not looking at her. “You mean if I were the only witness to a crime, that sort of thing?”“No. I mean, if there were other people around, but you were the only one who could see something. As if it were invisible to everyone but you.”He hesitated, still kneeling, the dented tape gun gripped in his hand.“I know it sounds crazy,” Clary ventured nervously, “but…”He turned around. His eyes, very blue behind the glasses, rested on her with a look of firm affection. “Clary, you’re an artist, like your mother. That means you see the world in ways that other people don’t. It’s your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn’t make you crazy—just different. There’s nothing wrong with being different.

~ Cassandra Clare

Within you is the power of unlimited creation.

~ Bryant Mcgill

People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.

~ Lionel Suggs

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can’t stiffen up enough to create them.

~ Gustave Flaubert

You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.

~ Fran Sorin

All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

~ Joseph Conrad

Innovation basically involves making obsolete that which you did before.

~ Jay Abraham

To ask how I feel about writing is to ask how I feel about breathing.

~ Shakirah Bourne

When did most of us stop being poets?

~ Michael St. George

Om meditation eliminates rigid and fixed views about the world. It creates a spacious, flexible and open views about the world.

~ Amit Ray

Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.

~ James C. Collins

We can’t turn our true selves off and on situationally and expect them to carry and sustain us. Rationing creativity results in bipolarism of the spirit. Our creativity is also our life force. When we turn it off and on like a spigot, we start to become less and less able to control the valve.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

~ Anthony Jay

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me(The Circus Animal's Desertion)

~ W.b. Yeats

Respect is not creative ... Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

Books deliver information so that experience has a chance to exercise creativity.

~ Richard Diaz

Igniting your creative potentials opens you up to new learnings and insights.

~ Deborah Day

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen

~ José Saramago