Creativity Quotes

"All one needs to write a story is one feeling and four walls."

- Doris Betts

"Drama is life, with the dull bits cut out."

- Alfred Hitchcock

"Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone."

- Simon McBurney

"Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV."

- Simon McBurney

"I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone."

- Maggie Smith

"I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."

- Peter Brook

"Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."

- G. K. Chesterton

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story."

- James Baldwin

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone."

- James Baldwin

"Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall."

- Ani DiFranco

"If you're alive, you're a creative person."

- Elizabeth Gilbert

"hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have."

- Maya Angelou

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"I have no interest in making a work that doesn’t elicit a feeling."

- Kara Walker

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."

- Edward Hopper

"There’s something really cool about taking oily coloured paste and pushing it around with these hairy sticks and making something that looks like you. That’s the magic of painting."

- Kehinde Wiley

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for."

- Georgia O'Keeffe

"Art is the daughter of freedom."

- Friedrich Schiller

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."

- Albert Camus

"Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality."

- Edgar Degas

"A critic at my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings! Never! They are my letters, my secrets."

- Paul Gauguin

"Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative."

- Oscar Wilde

"never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Art that cannot shape society and therefore also cannot penetrate the heart questions of society, and in the end influence the question of capital, is no art."

- Joseph Beuys

"Art provides an opportunity for kaleidoscopic thinking. Each time we shift the lens of our perceptions, we gain new perspectives — and new opportunities for innovation."

- Linda Naiman

"Flowers don’t open and close according to who is walking by. They open and show their beauty regardless."

- Rebecca Campbell

"Your intelligence and creativity are the keys to unlocking your dreams."

"We all have at least 100,000 bad drawings inside of us. The sooner we get them out and onto paper, the sooner we’ll get to the good ones buried deep within."

"Ninety years is a masterpiece of a life, painted with the vibrant colors of love and laughter."