EVERYBODY IS A CONSUMER and enjoyer of creative works: the written word, visual arts, and performing arts. I'm guessing that quite a few people reading this book are also creators or performers of such works: poets, novelists, painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, architects, musicians, dancers, crafters, chefs, tattooists, gingerbread house-makers (yes, I've met one who works at it full-time). . . . However we express ourselves, it's impossible not to wonder why and how we're doing it, not to mention whether we're doing it “well.” Pretty much every creative person has wondered the same thing, and almost any famous one you can name has offered his or her thoughts. The quotes below probe creativity from both sides, as creator and as imbiber.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours?
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Artists to my mind are the real
architects of change, and not the
political legislators who implement
change after the fact.
If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.
Do not read as children do, to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do, to educate themselves. No, read to live.
Of all that is written, I love only what a person hath written with his blood.
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Beneath the poetry of the texts, there is the actual poetry, without form and without text.
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
Life is a cornfield, but literature is that shot of whiskey that's been distilled down.
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
Do not read so much; look about you and think of what you see there.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.
If you wish to be a writer,
write.
In my writing I am acting as a map-maker, an explorer of psychic areas . . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
Somehow, poem-making and person-making is the same thing.
Young man: May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?
James Joyce: No, it did lots of other things, too.
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
You don't have to write a book in order to reflect reality. You can also write a book to create reality.
I write because I don't know what I
think until I read what I say.
—Flannery O'Connor
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
I used to think the function of art was the transformation of sorrow, but now I think it is the transformation of consciousness.
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.
The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves—they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.
Audience member at a lecture:
How do you become a prophet?
Allen Ginsberg:
Tell
your
secrets.
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
A course on creativity in the arts and sciences, my class attracted academic misfits of an enchanting sort. Typically, a student might confess: “I'm in nuclear physics, but my real passion is for medieval Irish song.”
I invent nothing.
I rediscover.
—Auguste Rodin
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Many of the greatest creations of man have been inspired by the desire to make money. When George Frederick Handel was on his beam ends, he shut himself up for twenty-one days and emerged with the complete score of Messiah—and hit the jackpot.
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
Every child is an artist.
The problem is how to remain an artist
once he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso
Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
An empty canvas is a living wonder—far lovelier than certain pictures.
If you hear a voice within you say, “You cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his nocturnes answered:
“All of my life.”
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.
I paint the light that emanates from all bodies.
I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way—things that I had no words for.
Many say that life entered the human body by the help of music, but the truth is that life itself is music.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
“Jazz” is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.
Creation is a drug I can't do without.
We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.