Quotes about creativity

To shine is better than to reflect.

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.

People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect.

All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.

Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.

"Think from outside the box, collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it."

I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

“And when a man or a woman climbs, Beauty, he or she can end up as high as the angels or higher.”

“The saints,” I nodded, thinking I knew.

“Oh, saints,” Puck said. “Whsst. Saints! Martyrs and virgins and what all. Relics in churches, and both the relic and the churches dead as brass. No. I’ll tell you who climbs. Gardeners climb. And farmers. And painters. And poets. People who build beautiful things without destroying to do it.”

They can create something beautiful, useful, even something worthless. But they create. They don't destroy.

Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven.