Reading has been the fuel of my motivation, it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.
The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind to new horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. For a fraction of a second, you were open to options you’d never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
TV: Star Trek
I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”
If you are seeking creative ideas go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.
Write simply, clearly, and plausibly about things you know and types of humans whom you know. Never borrow from anyone else’s style. That is contemptible theft and if you borrow thus, you lose something essential within you that has a great part in making a good craftsman. Be honest, as honest as you possibly can in all ways. And work.
The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things—ancient history, 19th century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen.
Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity.
You think ‘great’ is right next door. It’s not. It’s in another country.
We do not undertake analysis of works because we want to copy them. We investigate the methods by which another has created his work, in order to set ourselves in motion.
I have a gift for silence - to show with my body the weight of my soul.
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
What I cannot create I do not understand.
Any great work of art…revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
Kids aren’t taught how to create…so they can’t create a reality of their own, a culture of their own. They’re forced to buy whatever culture comes at them through television, etc. For example, do you know how to bake bread, of course not. So you buy it. Imagine if everyone forgot how to bake bread except the big bakeries, how much they could charge and the shitty bread they could get away with selling. No, the only thing we really know is how to file stuff. No wonder kids start expressing themselves with guns and bombs. Our schools are creating a generation of slaves instead of masters.
An interview from www.chuckpalahniuk.net
Most people don’t realize they are being their most creative when they are not trying to be creative, when they’re simply solving the problem by using ideas they’ve seen used somewhere else before.
In the creative states man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.
A deep immersion in anything makes you more creative.
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think this world would be unlivable without art. Thank you for inspiring me.
Do something badly. The cure for writer’s block is to go ahead and write badly. Once you are in action, it’s easy to pick up the energy and pick up the quality.
Book: “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself” by Steve Chandler
I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.
The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
For me the thrill comes from innovating within a basic design and making something that beautifully performs its purpose.