Quotes about Creativity

I just love being in the studio, and that's kind of what I do when I'm not on the road. I'm just in the studio messing with stuff, and I love playing all the instruments.

I'm a very methodical writer. Before computers, I used reams of paper and stacks of index cards.

I don't think we listened to any rock n' roll at all in the early days. It was Miles Davis and John Coltrane 95% of the time.

I have nothing against employment but it seems that our school system is too focused on training good employees but not good entrepreneurs. There should be a balance. We should learn from the entrepreneurial mindset of the Chinese.

Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.

They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.

I think poets owe a special adoration to the third person of the Holy Trinity, for by these tongues of fire all men are made poets and philosophers, and that is the way Christ would have it on earth.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.