Creativity quotes

Welcome to our Creativity collection, a tribute to the boundless realm of imagination, originality, and the transformative power of embracing creativity as a means of self-expression and problem-solving. In this curated compilation of quotes, we explore the world of creativity, celebrating its ability to inspire innovation, ignite passion, and redefine the way we perceive art, ideas, and the human spirit.

Creativity is more than a concept; it's a wellspring of inspiration, a force that propels us to think beyond boundaries, and a source of empowerment that unleashes the unique potential within each of us. Our Creativity quotes honor the wisdom of those who've embraced the power of imaginative thinking, the insight that arises from understanding the transformative influence of creative expression, and the way creativity empowers us to transform challenges into opportunities and embrace the beauty of originality.

Whether you're captivated by the stories of individuals who've embraced creativity as a way of life, intrigued by the psychology of innovative thinking and artistic expression, or simply drawn to the narratives of individuals who've found empowerment through their creative pursuits, these quotes offer insights into the strategies, attitudes, and practices that nurture and celebrate creativity.

Embark on a journey that celebrates the stories of individuals who've embraced creativity as a boundless journey of self-expression, the wisdom drawn from understanding that true beauty lies in the power of human imagination, and the inspiration to infuse your own life with a sense of creativity that resonates with your values and aspirations. Discover the narratives of those who've found empowerment through creative expression, the secrets to cultivating a mindset of imaginative thinking, and the empowering realization that creativity is the key to unlocking your inner artist, innovator, and problem-solver.

Though I am never exactly "blocked" I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material - the challenge of presenting it in an original and engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes - but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Jim Grimsley
Jim Grimsley
Novelist
For me, writing plays is far more an act of the mind than of the emotions. It's a very different kind of impulse than fiction writing.
In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
I work with whatever mediums seems best suited to evoking the sorts of thoughts and emotions I am interested in playing with.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David
Neoclassical Master & Political Artist
To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.
Diana Krall
Diana Krall
Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & Pianist
The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.
Russell Hoban
Russell Hoban
Versatile Author & Creative Storyteller
Usually my starting point is something that I've seen. It might be a painting, it might be an object. But they always start from a definite sensory experience.
D.T. Suzuki
D.T. Suzuki
Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the West
Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.
Peter Deunov
Peter Deunov
Spiritual Teacher & Philosopher
If you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.
Harvey Mackay
Harvey Mackay
Business Guru & Motivational Speaker
Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.
Len Wiseman
Len Wiseman
Talented Filmmaker of "Underworld"
A lot of these movies are informed by the movies that come before them.
M. F. K. Fisher
M. F. K. Fisher
Pioneering Food Writer
I wrote from the time I was four. It was my way of screaming and yelling, the primal scream. I wrote like a junkie, I had to have my daily fix.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
American psychologist and author
You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution.
Quinn Shephard
Quinn Shephard
American actress, film director, producer, screenwriter and film editor
I'd like mostly stuff for design, because I like to design clothing.
Neil Patrick Harris
Neil Patrick Harris
American actor, singer, writer, producer, and television host
If I wrote a musical it wouldn't be about me. Although I do some magic, so it would probably be about a magician who appeared and re-appeared all over the place.
Abdolkarim Soroush
Abdolkarim Soroush
Iranian Philosopher
When I have an idea, I'm like a pregnant woman. I just have to deliver.
Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik
American Psychologist
What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, 'If you've never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you're not really an intellectual.'
Adam Grant
Adam Grant
American Author
When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.
Yves Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent
French fashion designer
I prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
I don't want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
Diana Krall
Diana Krall
Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & Pianist
So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
D.T. Suzuki
D.T. Suzuki
Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the West
Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
MARVEL IS A CORNUCOPIA OF FANTASY, A WILD IDEA , A SWASHBUCKLING ATTITUDE , AN ESCAPE FROM THE HUMDRUM AND PROSAIC. IT'S A SERENDIPITOUS FEAST FOR THE MIND, THE EYE , AND THE IMAGINATION, A LITERATE CELEBRATION OF UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY, COUPLED WITH A TOUCH OF REBELLION AND AN INSOLENT DESIRE TO SPIT IN THE EYE OF THE DRAGON.
Harvey Mackay
Harvey Mackay
Business Guru & Motivational Speaker
One sure-fire way to stay creative: force yourself to learn something new.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
American psychologist and author
The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos
Neil Patrick Harris
Neil Patrick Harris
American actor, singer, writer, producer, and television host
When you call someone and ask them to do something they've never done before, in different mediums I think they would be inclined to pass because they're afraid of the risk. But the creative people who populate the theater world love the challenge of new things.
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
I would say my work is anti-ironic.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
Diana Krall
Diana Krall
Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & Pianist
I always wonder what drives us as Artists.
D.T. Suzuki
D.T. Suzuki
Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the West
Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
I think people have always loved things that are bigger than life, things that are imaginative.
Harvey Mackay
Harvey Mackay
Business Guru & Motivational Speaker
We start out as pretty creative beings... Children let their imaginations take them to place they've never seen and do things that seem impossible. We encourage it as fun and playtime, but we should celebrate it as the potential for great discovery and accomplishment.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
American psychologist and author
In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
I don't set out to make something that is repulsive and that would scare people. I know that some people don't like what I make, and don't find it cute, but that's hard for me to understand.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?
Harvey Mackay
Harvey Mackay
Business Guru & Motivational Speaker
You can't hurry creativity, so take time to ponder your ideas. Sit back and take time to think things over. That's usually how the best ideas bloom.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
American psychologist and author
When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Writing is the most solitary of arts.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
If there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.
The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Materials are very important to me, and always have been.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Write about it by day and dream about it by night.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
I always figure I'm not unique, and something that would please me hopefully would please a lot of other people that have the same tastes that I do.
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
It's a tremendous challenge, because there have been so many characters created over the years. Every time you think you come up with a great name, you find out somebody has already done it. Dreaming up the stories isn't that hard, but coming up with a good title is the toughest part.
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
A writer's work is the product of laziness.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
When you can sit down with a plain sheet of paper in front of you and make some notes, and, little by little, you see it take shape and become a concept for a movie or a TV show. That's a real thrill. You watch it go from notes on a paper to a meeting with writers and directors and actors. I can't think of anything that's more exciting.
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
E. B. White
E. B. White
Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved Classics
Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.
Stan Lee
Stan Lee
Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel Heroes
I enjoyed reading Batman, and Superman, and all the super ones, but I never wished I created them. I've got to let there be some work for other people!
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.