Creative Quotes

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

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

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.

I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.
At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.

Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.

Blessed are the weird people:
poets, misfits, writers
mystics, painters, troubadours
for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don’t know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it – whatsoever it is

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

I feel like I've swallowed a cloudy sky

Fashion does not have to prove that it is serious. It is the proof that intelligent frivolity can be something creative and positive

How To Be An Explorer Of The World
1. Always Be LOOKING (notice the ground beneath your feet.)
2. Consider Everything Alive & Animate
3. EVERYTHING Is Interesting. Look Closer.
4. Alter Your Course Often.
5. Observe For Long Durations (and short ones).
6. Notice The Stories Going On Around You.
7. Notice PATTERNS. Make CONNECTIONS.
8. DOCUMENT Your Findings (field notes) In A VAriety Of Ways.
9. Incorporate Indeterminacy.
10. Observe Movement.
11. Create a Personal DIALOGUE With Your Environment. Talk to it.
12. Trace Things Back to Their ORIGINS.
13. Use ALL of the Senses In Your Investigations.

When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness,
there are three things that can show you the way:
instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation,
creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.

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

What is this thing you call substance abuse?
All I wanna do is forget and get loose.
Drinking and smoking over and over
What's so great about a life that's sober?
There's nothing cool about being young
When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.
I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.
All I wanna do is drink and die.
Nothing is real. It's all a big lie.
All I wanna do is drink and die.
There's nothing cool about being young
When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You are perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that.

Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.

Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.

The artist lives to have stories to tell and to learn to tell them well.

Everyone lives in two worlds, Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life.

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 instrument.
You then look inside yourself. You pull and tug and squeeze and fish around for slippery raw shapeless
things
that swim like fish made of cloud vapor and fill you with living clamor. You latch onto something. And you bring it forth out of your head like Zeus giving birth to Athena.
And as it comes out, it takes shape and tangible form.
It drips on the canvas, and slides through your pen, it springs forth and resonates into the musical strings, and slips along the edge of the sculptor’s tool onto the surface of the wood or marble.
You have given it cohesion. You have brought forth something ordered and beautiful out of nothing.
You have glimpsed the divine.

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kidergarten. Then wen you hit puberty they take te crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on agebra, history, ect. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.

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.

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

If man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

Joy is but the sign that creative emotion is fulfilling its purpose.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

All political movements are basically anti-creative — since a political movement is a form of war. There’s no place for impractical dreamers around here, that’s what they always say. Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around. As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers. Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

Remember to delight yourself first, then others can be truly delighted."
This was my mantra when I published my first book in 1990, and still holds true. When we focus on the song of our soul and heart, then others will be touched similarly. Sometimes people wonder or worry whether people will like or approve of their creative expression. It's none of your business. It's your business to stay present and focused for the work of your deepest dreams. It might look crooked or strange, or be very odd-but if it delights you, then it is yours, and will find it's way into other hearts.

If the fate of the universe was decided in a single moment at the instant of the Big Bang , that was the most creative moment of all.

The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . .

In his creative work the artist is dependent on sources and resources deriving from the spiritual unconscious.

If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

Living with hope is like rubbing up against a cheese grater. It keeps taking slices off you until there's so little left you just crumble.

What do you mean, 'playing really creatively'? Can you give me an example?"
"Hmm, let's see ... you send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.

Never be ashamed of madness, instead be ashamed of people that are ashamed of madness. Without a little bit of insanity, we would have never had the Theory of Relativity, electricity, airplanes, cars or your beloved iPhone. Madness got you that.

If you took the world away and just left the elctricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made - a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

In reality, all men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives trying to create a masterpiece.

In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

Creative minds don't follow rules, they follow will.