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Creativity Quotes

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Creativity Quotes

“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.”

“Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished.”

“Creativity is basically a feminine process. I'm convinced that we have in our soul, everybody, this masculine side and this feminine side. So at the end of the day, you always use this feminine creative energy to write or to do any type of art or creativity. So if I see that my protagonist is feminine, it's not more difficult, no. And even when my protagonist is masculine, I'm writing from using this feminine energy.”

“Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.”

“I was always the type of drug user that I had no moderation. When I was smoking and drinking, I was full on smoking and drinking. And I am also the type of drug user where I do smoke and drink, there's no creativity in terms of my writing process. I would just stare at the paper for hours and nothing would get done.”

“For some reason there's this myth that creativity - [especially] in terms of creative writing - is a gift you either have, or you don't. So when people first start writing, if they write something that's not very good, or if they try and it's difficult, they go, "Oh, I guess I don't have it." That doesn't seem very fair, you have to try and you have to work at it. If we get scared of one bad poem and quit, that's not doing anybody any good.”

“Before I decided to concentrate on writing, I drew pictures and painted, and made Super 8 experimental movies. I was the singer in three rock bands, and I wrote and staged and acted in plays for kids in my neighborhood. So I was kind of all over the place in my interests and far-flung in terms of where my creativity wanted to end up.”

“Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.”

“Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.”

“Ko Un's poems evoke the open creativity and fluidity of nature, and funny turns and twists of Mind. Mind is sometimes registered in Buddhist terms - Buddhist practice being part of Ko Un's background. Ko Un writes spare, short-line lyrics direct to the point, but often intricate in both wit and meaning. Ko Un has now traveled worldwide and is not only a major spokesman for all Korean culture, but a voice for Planet Earth Watershed as well.”

“To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.”

“I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you're doing, you're not doing it as well as you can. Don't think about publishing, don't think about editors, don't think about marketplace.”

“A completed book exists in its entirety, although we humans read it in a time sequence from the beginning to the end. Just as an author does not write the first chapter, and then leave the others to write themselves, So God's creativity is not to seem as uniquely confined to, or even especially invested in, the event of the Big Bang. Rather his creativity has been seen as permeating equally all space and all time: his role as Creator and Sustainer merge.”

“The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.”

“A friend of mine helped me find my confidence by trusting the knowledge that I was not alone in writing my first book. She helped me wake up to the fact that I had a source of creativity that was my true creative nature and when I embraced it and asked for this presence in my life, I felt as if the dam of the Niagra Falls had burst and all sorts of wonderful things started to happen when I found my voice. It has been a process ever since and I am now a big advocate in the message that we are not alone and we all have ample creativity within us if we just trust it.”

“I began researching and writing what I intended as a book-length essay entitled Fascination and Liberation, exploring the question of whether there is a conflict between creativity and the Eastern form of enlightenment. I don't know if I'll ever finish that essay, because I had an experience, after I'd written two or three chapters, in which it seemed to me that my psychic antibodies decisively rejected Buddhism. Interestingly, the rejection felt as if it happened in Zen terms.”

“As you get drawn more and more into other activities, like political activities, very demanding, you have to find different rhythms of writing; I think that's the word I'm looking for, rhythms of creativity which then, of course, become very intense. I think your writing then tends to be very intensified simply because there are other demands which seem equally important.”

“I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer to give a voice to his community. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you're not writing, when your writing's not dealing with a concrete political situation.”

“These things - the degree of vulnerability, the degree of skill, the degree of the longing to give - are influx all the time, And to lump all that under the word "creativity" assumes something much more static than it is. That's why an artist may be marvelous in her 20s, and be creating automatic crap in her 40s. A writer may be trivial in his 20s, and be writing incredibly in his 50s, because those things are always in flux.”

“This is what the Democrats are fighting for. They're fighting for you not to have a job and still have health care so you can pursue your entrepreneurial risk of writing, painting, taking pictures. It's just such a pain in the rear end to have to have a job. It's so damn mean of this country to require people to have a job. It stifles people. It stifles creativity and economic growth to require people to have a job, to have health care. What a country. Man, are we horribly rotten mean to people.”

“In the recovery movement, they call what I'm talking about letting go and letting God. If you're uncomfortable with the word God, just add an o and make it Good. The two words are interchangeable. It just means allowing this divine source of kindness, beauty and creativity to be the dominant force in your life - whatever you're doing. I truly believe that God writes all the books and builds all the bridges. Sure, I sit down for six or seven hours a day with my pen and pads - but the message moves though me and I just allow.”

“Over the years, I developed an extreme hostility towards the non-profit art organization gulag. I formed the opinion that it's actually a very sophisticated form of government suppression of creativity, particularly in young people. When I see the younger generation dragged into this and being told to write these statements and take these photos, define your work this way or that way, I think it's wrong. I think instead of paying any attention to politics, a great project for young artists is to attack and destroy the non-profits of our world.”

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”