Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I look at ordinary objects, and I see things that other people don't see. That's why I'm a photographer.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Mr. Freeman sighs. "No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

I admire people who are creative.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

I think if you are creative then it's an unstoppable thing. It just keeps coming throughout your entire life.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.