creativity quotes

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

The artist in me cries out for design.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It’s the same with me and writing.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

A lot of people don’t realise I came out of the Smoky Mountains with a load of songs.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

Why, if someone is good in one field can they not be accepted or given the slightest opportunity to express and be creative in other fields?

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I wanted to get a job being creative, and I did.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

The whole ‚enigmatic artist‘ thing, I just ran with it.

Young people can create beautiful things.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

We must use time creatively.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I can operate in half-a-song format.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

Literally wrote ‚Starboy‘ in 30 minutes.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I don’t intend to stop making music.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I’m interested in Jackson Pollock’s kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it’s nothing, and yet it’s incredible.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.