Berry Gordy Quotes

Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God!

… there is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly.

The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy.

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

I think that all creative people are a little bit nuts.

Writers ... I think ... live on that fine line between insanity and genius.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

All artists are crazy.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

We don't have to look back at da Vinci's work and Albert Einstein's work and Mozart's work. We're actually living in the time period that David Lynch is creating his art. We're so lucky.

I think Berry Gordy is a genius, I really do, and it's not a word I throw around lightly. But with all that comes the idiosyncratic behavior of a self-made, talented, creative person, and that's not easy to come up against.

I do have some very strange thoughts... Still, all geniuses are mad aren't they?

Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise.

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

I think every genius person has a bit of insanity.

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

All artists are crackpots. And it's their finest feature.

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

A great mind must be androgynous.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.