Charles Dickens Quotes

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

I think you always win in storytelling when you let the best creative ideas guide you.

Guillermo del Toro is able to invent his worlds. I would find the pressure of having to invent crippling.

The most extraordinary discoveries are made when the artist is overwhelmed by what he has to say.

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better. All day long when I was busy [...], I had my unfinished novel personified almost as a secret companion and accomplice following me like a shadow wherever I went, whatever I did.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

Intelligence is not creative; judgment is not creative. If a sculptor is nothing but skill and mind, his hands will be without genius.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

I'm not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living. When I was making "Star Wars," I wasn't restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, "I'm going to create a world that's fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it."

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

I love design, so it's important for me to have a creative outlet.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: 'If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.'

I absolutely adore the alchemy of a bit of an idea.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.