Quotes about Creativity

If I could meet Rembrandt right where he had painted father and son, God and humanity, compassion and misery, in one circle of love, I would come to know as much as I ever would about death and life. I also sensed the hope that through Rembrandt's masterpiece I would one day be able to express what I most wanted to say about love.

I looked at the splendid drawings and paintings Rembrandt created in the midst of all his setbacks, disillusionment and grief. One must have died many deaths and cried many tears to have painted a portrait of God in such humility.

The soul of the artist cannot remain hidden.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

Let him march to the music he hears.

An artist is first an amateur.

Nature is mythical and mystical always, and works with the license and extravagance of genius.

If you can speak what you will never hear,—if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things

Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.