Creativity Quotes

I write the sacred words from wondering.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Failure for one is a source of creativity, build on it and a different story will puzzle itself.

~ Unarine Ramaru

The spark of wondering is the start of writing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I know something is super creative, when I feel disappointed that I didn't come up with the idea!

~ Simón Silva

Creativity is improvisation

~ Simón Silva

Creativity helps us fight off the monotony of everyday life!

~ Simón Silva

The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

Creativity is encountering something unexpected

~ Simón Silva

...never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own.

~ Alice Hoffman

Someday they would discover that the stars were not sacred, but made from the same material as their bodies. They would learn it was the stars that created their worlds, that worlds created their minds, that minds created tools, and tools could create stars. Growing, sprawling, thriving until they too became masters of their own understanding, chasing enlightenment with the fervor of having nothing to lose, launching from their homelands like fireworks with glorious yellow tails.

~ Jake Vander-Ark

The genius inside a person wants activity. It’s connected to the stars, it’s connected to a spark and it wants to burn and it wants to make and it wants to create and it has gifts to give. That is the nature of inner genius.

~ Michael Meade

Start small.Start now.Start everything.And don’t bother to finish any of it.

~ Barbara Sher

Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.

~ Michael Meade

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.

~ Julia Cameron

One needs to pursue some sort of a creative interest in order to keep life from eating us alive.

~ Pawan Mishra

There's so much to write. Where should I start?I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are

~ Ruth Ozeki

He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.

~ Lauren Groff

I don’t experience writer’s block, I only have periods of severe writer’s diarrhoea; an incoherent mess of unfitting words placed in random sentences. Luckily, I can usually separate the shit from “the shit” later on.

~ Kevin Focke

New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

In the wander land, we engage ourselves in writing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It is the nature of intuition to spark and guide creativity, and it's an essential ingredient for anything new to happen in the world at all.

~ Maggie Macnab

Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores.

~ Adam Grant

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses. When

~ Adam Grant

And be grateful that you’re a Scanner. Not everyone can have this much fun with nothing but what’s between her ears.

~ Barbara Sher

Let’s end the notion that ideas have no value unless they turn into a business or have some other practical use. Save them all in a beautiful book like Leonardo did. You might want to give them away someday, perhaps to someone who needs an idea. Or your great-great-grandchildren might love knowing what a fascinating mind you had. Or your biographer might be very happy after you’re gone.

~ Barbara Sher

Think different does not mean to think out of the box. It means to question what the significance of a box is?

~ Priyavrat Gupta

Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.

~ Rollo May

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

~ Rollo May

Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.

~ Louise Erdrich

You need to make a decision - are you are an imitator or an innovator?

~ Stewart Stafford

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as “given” to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a “creative person,” but only of a creative act.

~ Rollo May

Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. / For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike / down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. / For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb / before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond / your own intelligence.

~ Les Murray

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.

~ Aldo Leopold

Mr. Lawrence drank from his beer. Do you know how I figure out what to do? I look under rocks for slime. I lick the slime with my own tongue. I see the problem for what it is, not what a consultant's methodology says it should be. I find people who are working on something that no one told them to work on, who solve a problem because they can't let it stay unsolved, who don't eat or bathe because it takes too much time. I find the ones selling their ideas to customers without going through the marketing department first. I've gotten good at picking molds off cheeses and turning them into penicillin. People used to wonder where my ideas came from. It was simple: I looked for slimy rocks and moldy cheese, and I watched the bank account like a hawk. It worked well for this company for a long time.

~ Charlie Close

These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.

~ Rollo May

The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality.

~ Rollo May

I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have always supposed that to be my own fault because I would not take the trouble of practicing.

~ Jane Austen

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

~ Harold Bloom

It tugged at his soul not to talk to other writers about his work. He loved the bank, keeping it secure and compliant with the laws and regulations. People assumed these things happened by magic. They did not. Hauer never talked about it outside the office. He didn't want to make the other writers uncomfortable. If he developed a reputation as someone who brought his work with him to writers conferences they would all turn away, to sip and swizzle their drinks without him.

~ Charlie Close

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.

~ John Fowles