Creativity Quotes

“In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”
― Rollo May

“Accomplishments don’t erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had."

[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]”
― Anna Quindlen

“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“Originality is the best form of rebellion.”
― Mike Sasso, Being Human: Everything you didn't want to know about life.

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.

...I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ”
― Ray Bradbury

“I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.”
― Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way

“I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.”
― J.K. Rowling

“He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Tolkien Reader

“Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.”
― Ester Buchholz

“Creativity arises from our ability to see things from many different angles.”
― Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum

“A lack of illusion is golden, and it is quite possible that creativity is the highest form of intelligence. One might further develop oneself in the creative sense and, therefore, at times, find some degree of shame more so than pride when having always followed that of the safe and ever-praised academia.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I write because there are things in me that cannot die.”
― Sanober Khan

“Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Spend more time doing things that make you forget about the time.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“You can't make a fan of everyone. Stay true to your story, characters, music, art or whatever it is you do and fuck everyone else who doesn't like it. Life isn't perfect.”
― Ann Marie Frohoff

“Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.”
― Brendan Francis Brown

“When talented people write badly, it's generally for one of two reasons: Either they're blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove of they're driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They're moved by a desire to touch the audience.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“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.”
― Richie Norton

“But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“Créer, c'est vivre deux fois.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.”
― W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

“Every impression ever made on a person from newborn babyhood onwards will contribute to the shape and texture of the imagination.”
― Lesley Glaister

“We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.”
― Edward de Bono

“In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?”
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“When I think of normality I think of mediocrity”
― Gillian Anderson