Quotes about Creativity

The professional blows critics off. He doesn't even hear them. Critics, he reminds himself, are the unwitting mouthpieces of Resistance and as such can be truly cunning and pernicious. They can articulate in their reviews the same toxic venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil. Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons.

We don't tell ourselves, I'm never going to write my symphony. Instead we say, I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

I read R.D. Laing, I read Victor Frankl. Anything by Ken Kesey or Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, R. Crumb, Bob Dylan. These sacred texts are passed from one hand to another like relics of a religious past or harbingers of a new faith.

It is the creative and enterprising spirit of people that is indispensable. Everything else is supplemental.

There's nothing efficient about innovation.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation.

Time may not be on our side, but innovation is.

Acting is my first love and I want to stick to it. But I would be happy to offer my inputs to a script, if asked.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

I benefit from a change of scenery; it's always inspiring.

For me, my music is part of me, and which is why it seems second nature, and my compositions are instinctive.