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The promise of happiness is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Lucian Freud
Could synaesthesia help to explain creativity? He [Professor Ramachandran] started to look at artists and their influences. Many famous artists have been synaesthetic including the jazz legend Miles Davis and the painter Kandinsky ... Take for example Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s metaphors are synaesthetic. Horizon: Derek Tastes of Ear Wax, BBC 2004
We all know it when it happens – the moment when the light seems to go in your head. The instant when you experience a flash of inspiration. Scientists are beginning to understand how these moments come about. Horizon – The Creative Brain: How Insight Works, BBC 2013
The thing about these insight moments is that they are fleeting, elusive and really hard to study. ibid.
This aspect of creative insight seems to happen in the right hemisphere. ibid.
A burst of gamma waves – and this is what you experience as a moment of insight. ibid.
Mind wandering has a long history in mind creativity. ibid.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. Jean Piaget
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Erich Fromm
Self-portrait ... That sense of creative intensity. Tim Marlow at the Courtauld 3/3, Channel 4 2010
A series of conversations about the whole nature of creativity. Tim Marlow on Doug Aitken: The Source, Sky Arts 2012
The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense. Pablo Picasso
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. Pablo Picasso
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love. Francis Bacon
This project is about the roots of creativity ... This project is called The Source. Doug Aitken
Without freedom of choice there is no creativity. Without creativity there is no life, the body dies. Star Trek: The Return of the Archons s1e21, Kirk to machine
Have you any idea who I am? Well you lost all your early memories. We thought you would but we couldn’t be certain. Oh, Data, I was there … I helped create you. And now look at you. Star Trek: The Next Generation s7e10: Inheritance, Juliana
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. Raoul Vaneigem
Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. Franklin D Roosevelt
It is the tension between creativity and scepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. Carl Sagan
If you wish to make an apple-pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple. Charles Mingus
I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In Nature’s presence stood, as now I stand,
A sensitive being, a creative soul. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1850
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. Martin Luther King junior
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. Virginia Woolf
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years. V S Naipaul
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. Steve Jobs
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Edwin Land
Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever. Marilyn Monroe
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death. Rollo May
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature. Eric Hoffer
Creativity takes courage. Henri Matise
And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
To destroy is always the first step in any creation. e e cummings
Why does man create? Is it man’s purpose on earth to express himself, to bring form to thought, and to discover meaning in experience? Or is it just something to do when he’s bored? Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos. Mary Shelley
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves. Carl Gustav Jung
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts. Henry Moore
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create. William Blake
They did not think they were entitled to a fair share of the good things they helped to create! Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
If we don’t have any real enemies, it may be necessary to create them. G Edward Griffin, interview Shadowplay I
I’ve always felt at home in the past. For after all what is the present except an endless chain of memories? Some of them are translated into stone. We are all the inheritors of those memories. And we look after them as best we can. All this so we can pass on their revelation to the future. Simon Schama, Civilisations I: Second Moment of Creation, BBC 2018
The significance of Palmyra was at once both local and universal. ibid.