Creative quotes
3.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside creative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If an artist is reaching for the universe as a source of creative muse, then I'm there. I'm gonna say, "Yeah. Here's Saturn. Here's a black hole. Here's twisted space-time. Talk to me. What do you need? What do you want?" And I'll just feed you, because I think only then does science become mainstream - when science becomes a legitimate topic for artists."
"Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste."
"Feeling creative produces great work in approximately the same way that "feeling like a doctor" makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon."
"So that is the design process or the creative process. Start with a problem, forget the problem, the problem reveals itself or the solution reveals itself and then you reevaulate it. This is what you are doing all the time."
"Artie is a singer, and I'm a writer and player and a singer. We didn't work together on a creative level and prepare the songs. I did that."
"How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself."
"Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be."
"To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be."
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
"I think that when you decide to dedicate yourself to creative endeavors and surround yourself with people who are creative, you very quickly learn how hard it is to survive doing those kinds of things, not to mention make a living at them."
"Film is definitely a director's medium. They're responsible for the look and everything, and you're a part of that process as an actor, and you try to contribute to the story. But I think it might sound a little pretentious for me to say I think of myself as an artist. I think of myself as a creative person."
"Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress."
"I've had so many interviews where the last question is, Are you gay? I had to find very creative ways to say that I was gay, but that I wasn't going to talk about it."
"You have the capacity to change the plot line of your life, even if you've been acting from the same script since before you can remember. No matter what has happened up to this point, you have the right and the capacity to be happy. You are an innately creative being, capable of writing a love story worth living."
"The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others."
"The teacher, like the artist, the philosopher, and the man of letters, can only perform his work adequately if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority."
"The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness."
"Anytime we think the problem is 'out there,' that thought is the problem. We empower what's out there to control us. The change paradigm is 'outside-in' - what's out there has to change before we can change. The proactive approach is to change from the 'inside-out': to be different, and by being different, to effect positive change in what's out there - I can be more resourceful, I can be more diligent, I can be more creative, I can be more cooperative."
"I take a massage each week. This isn't an indulgence, it's an investment in your full creative expression/productivity/passion and sustained good health."
"The most important thing about creativity is that you honor your creativity and you don't ever ignore it or go against what that creative image is telling you."
