Creative Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The public is a great actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you.

It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.

Katherine Paterson

Creating doesn't make us unhappy, unhappiness makes us creative. To create is to live, and in living, we want only to creat more, to set our foundations depper and reach higher toward the sky. If sadness is what makes us creative, then sadness is nothing else but life.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

Vladimir Nabokov

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."

Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field.... When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative.

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.

Nothing can compare to creating characters and worlds out of thin air with your friends and making a book exactly the way you think it should be made, pure creative freedom, purity of intention, with no boundaries.

The unique challenge which chemical synthesis provides for the creative imagination and the skilled hand ensures that it will endure as long as men write books, paint pictures, and fashion things which are beautiful, or practical, or both.

Robert Burns Woodward

In the Reggio Emilia preschools, however, each child is viewed as infinitely capable, creative, and intelligent. The job of the teacher is to support these qualities and to challenge children in appropriate ways so that they develop fully.

Louise Arner Boyd

Yet never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant it more firmly in place. Have I not told you all thought is creative?

Neale Donald Walsch

Life... may be regarded either as a negligible accident in a bye-product of the cosmic process, or as the supreme manifestation of the high effort of creative evolution, for which the Earth alone, in the chances of time and space, has given a fitting home.

William Cecil Dampier

Creative expression requires an ability to work with feelings and channel them. Frustration, dissatisfaction, and even a sense of desperation may help you access an eloquence you never knew existed.

Metaphysical aspects of star gazing — its potential as a vehicle for therapeutic relaxation, meditation, and spiritual contact with the awesome creative power manifests in all of nature but is pinnacled in the stars.

For many artists fame complements the value of creative self-expression. Ludwig van Beethoven loved composing music, but he probably would have enjoyed it less if no one ever listened to the product.

To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.

Honoré de Balzac

On this matter of criticism, something that appalls me is the idea going around now that the practice of criticism is opposed to the literary impulse—is necessarily opposed to it. Sure, it may be a trap, it may destroy the creative impulse, but so may drink or money or respectability. But criticism is a perfectly natural human activity, and somehow the dullest, most technical criticism may be associated with full creativity.

Robert Penn Warren

David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are literary fiction. I couldn't agree more. But we might soon have to add that the two most depressing words in the American language are creative nonfiction.

Although will never love anyone again, don't want to become bitter. Or creative.

There are an infinite number of rewards you could bestow on yourself for working at your creative projects, and you deserve every one of them.

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

A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary discussion is that, within the latter people usually hold relatively fixed positions and argue in favor of their views as they try to convince others to change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give rise to anything creative.

What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?

Terry Tempest Williams