Creative Quotes - Page 13

• I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Senior, Couple, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• It's very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

  Nhat Hanh

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  "Exclusive Interview With Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 21, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• There isn't any great mystery about me. What I do is glamorous and has an awful lot of white-hot attention placed on it. But the actual work requires the same discipline and passion as any job you love doing, be it as a very good pipe fitter or a highly creative artist.

  Tom Hanks

  Jobs, Passion, Artist

  4 Copy quote

• Oklahomans value our children and our seniors. Oklahomans value traditions of faith. Oklahomans value our heroes, our veterans. Oklahomans value innovation and the creative arts.

  Brad Henry

  Senior, Art, Children

  7 Copy quote

• I suddenly realised, hey, I'm not a lazy idiot, I'm an idler! It's something to aspire to, it's part of the creative process! That's fantastic!

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Lazy, Idlers, Hey

  "How To Be Idle". Interview with Katie Renz, www.motherjones.com. June 8, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Indolence of course is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

  Tom Hodgkinson

  Nursing, Sitting, Losing

  "A lack of elegy" by Tom Hodgkinson, www.theguardian.com. November 7, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.

  John Hodgman

  Writing, Mean, Years

  "The Exchange: John Hodgman". Interview with Thessaly La Force, www.newyorker.com. November 11, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The only thing I have no control over is the politics that goes on within the record company. It's always been the same, but it's far tougher now, because record companies are run by financial people; before, they were run by creative people.

  Enrique Iglesias

  Running, People, Records

  9 Copy quote

• I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

  Walter Isaacson

  Smart, Thinking, Engineering

  7 Copy quote

• I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably do make-up and beauty and hair and something creative like styling; I really enjoy it.

  Jessie J

  Thinking, Hair, Singers

  "EXCLUSIVE! Jessie J: 'If I wasn't a singer I'd probably do make-up'". Glamour interview, www.glamourmagazine.co.uk. July 5, 2013.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• As far back as I can remember, I had an interest in fashion. I used to go to sleepaway camp, and they'd provide a list of things that you had to bring, and I always wanted to be a bit more creative than the list allowed. Like, if they required chinos, I wanted to hand-paint them.

  Marc Jacobs

  Fashion, Hands, Lists

  4 Copy quote

• Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.

  Marc Jacobs

  Effort, Choices, Design

  4 Copy quote

• Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Lying, Science, Math

  Orthodoxy ch. 2 (1908)

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Zest, Careers, Independence

  5 Copy quote

• Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.

  Anthony Storr

  Bridges, Needs, Behaviour

  5 Copy quote

• But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end.

  J. D. Salinger

  Passion, Men, Records

  J.D. Salinger (1951). “The Catcher in the Rye”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Hurt, Children, Growing Up

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.65, Convergent Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

  William S. Burroughs

  Creativity, Artist, People

  "New York library buys personal archives of Naked Lunch author" by Dan Glaister, www.theguardian.com. March 1, 2006.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

  Ayn Rand

  Numbers, Mind, Brain

  Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff (1999). “The Journals of Ayn Rand”, p.102, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.

  Brenda Ueland

  Writing, Thinking, Blessing

  Brenda Ueland (2013). “If You Want to Write”, p.12, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

  Brenda Ueland

  Live In The Present, Creative Power

  10 Copy quote

• But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Live Life, Creativity

  4 Copy quote

• Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girlfriend, Writing, School

  7 Copy quote

• Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

  Anne Fadiman

  Responsibility, Writing, Voice

  7 Copy quote

• Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

  John Steinbeck

  Lonely, Art, Philosophy

  "East of Eden". Book by John Steinbeck, 1952.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source