Francis Ford Coppola Quotes

Creativity is the power to act.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

I get inspiration from movies, from fashion, then completely random things you'd never think of.

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

I'm always looking for something new: a new inspiration, a new philosophy, a new way to look at something, new talent.

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.

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.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

There's no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I go wherever my creativity takes me.

When a good idea sparks, it's usually because of some subversive angle that means the song we're writing will be fresh.

Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.

New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp.

Creativity has got to have some edge to it, doesn't it?

Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.

The key to artistry is being able to say stuff the way other people can't.