Quotes about Creativity

All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water. - From Mark Twain's Notebook, 1885

Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

He worked up his old battles and tricked them out with fresh splendors; also with new terrors, for he added artillery now.

Writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. But

it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

Almost always the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better.

We must use time creatively - and forever realize that the time is always hope to do great things.