Creative Impulse Quotes

The more stories I told, the more I found I wanted to tell. There was always something left unsaid. I got hooked by my own impulse of 'Well, what's gonna happen next?'

I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.

We are born to create, and we can't help it. Why is that? Because God, the great Creator, is in us.

What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

An original is a creation motivated by desire.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious.

It was a sudden inspiration. But inspiration never came without a reason.

The itch of scribbling.

The vital spirit. L'élan vital

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

Many have an irresistible itch for writing.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.

When I see a white piece of paper, I feel I've got to draw. And drawing, for me, is the beginning of everything.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

God made man because he loved to listen to stories.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before. Creation brings satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take organized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty.