Creativity Quotes

"It's alive! It's alive!"

- Frankenstein (1931)

"A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow."

- Charles Brower

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

- Tom Robbins

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

- James Michener

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

- Ray Bradbury

"A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow."

- Charles Brower

"My creative muse is wabi-sabi, a practice where inessentials are trimmed away or eliminated. The intersection where wabi (minimal) and sabi (functional) meet is the platform for my creativity: space and quiet solitude, simplicity."

- Laurie Buchanan

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."

- Salman Rushdie

"Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can’t help but consider irony."

- Ann Beattie

"The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships."

- Leo Burnett

"It unfolds as you write it. That’s something I never believed before I wrote a book, but it does."

- Joan Didion

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s."

- Stephen King

"My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying."

- Anton Chekhov

"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read."

- Groucho Marx

"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words."

- William H. Gass

"Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."

- J. K. Rowling

"Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

- Mark Twain

"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

- Robert Frost

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

- Charles Baudelaire

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

- John Steinbeck

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."

- Norman Mailer

"When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time."

- Lady Gaga

"If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone."

- Robert Fulghum

"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals."

- Sylvia Plath

"Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things."

- Peter Zumthor

"Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity."

- T.S. Eliot

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."

- Samuel Johnson

"Hang in there. Every great idea started as someone’s messy desk."

- Unknown

"Don’t be afraid to get a little messy. Sometimes the most beautiful things come from unexpected splatters."

"Don’t be afraid to color outside the lines. Creativity is your superpower, use it to paint your world with vibrant possibilities."