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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorThough 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterAll 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
— NovelistFor 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.
Antonio Machado
— PoetIn order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistI work with whatever mediums seems best suited to evoking the sorts of thoughts and emotions I am interested in playing with.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsA writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
Jacques-Louis David
— Neoclassical Master & Political ArtistTo give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.
Diana Krall
— Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & PianistThe greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.
Russell Hoban
— Versatile Author & Creative StorytellerUsually 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
— Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the WestGreat works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesComics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.
Peter Deunov
— Spiritual Teacher & PhilosopherIf you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.
Harvey Mackay
— Business Guru & Motivational SpeakerDon'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
— Talented Filmmaker of "Underworld"A lot of these movies are informed by the movies that come before them.
M. F. K. Fisher
— Pioneering Food WriterI 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
— American psychologist and authorYou are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution.
Quinn Shephard
— American actress, film director, producer, screenwriter and film editorI'd like mostly stuff for design, because I like to design clothing.
Neil Patrick Harris
— American actor, singer, writer, producer, and television hostIf 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
— Iranian PhilosopherWhen I have an idea, I'm like a pregnant woman. I just have to deliver.
Alison Gopnik
— American PsychologistWhat 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
— American AuthorWhen 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
— French fashion designerI prefer to shock rather than to bore through repetition.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWriting allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterCreativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistI don't want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsHabitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
Diana Krall
— Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & PianistSo 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
— Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the WestTechnical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesMARVEL 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
— Business Guru & Motivational SpeakerOne sure-fire way to stay creative: force yourself to learn something new.
Timothy Leary
— American psychologist and authorThe 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
— American actor, singer, writer, producer, and television hostWhen 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— Author'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.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterA . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsI admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
Diana Krall
— Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & PianistI always wonder what drives us as Artists.
D.T. Suzuki
— Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the WestArt always has something of the unconscious about it.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI think people have always loved things that are bigger than life, things that are imaginative.
Harvey Mackay
— Business Guru & Motivational SpeakerWe 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
— American psychologist and authorIn 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorStories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterNo 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.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistI 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
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsA 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
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIf 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
— Business Guru & Motivational SpeakerYou 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
— American psychologist and authorWhen you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWriting is the most solitary of arts.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterWriting is nothing more than a guided dream.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistIf there are moments in my work when people find joy and humour, that's a real success for me.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsGenius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesTo me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorThe great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterCensorship is the mother of metaphor.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistMaterials are very important to me, and always have been.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWrite about it by day and dream about it by night.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIdeas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterWhen 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
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsThurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIt'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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWhen 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterThe things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsA writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorA writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterA writer's work is the product of laziness.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsNecessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesWhen 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterA 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
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsOf 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
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI 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!
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIf 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.