Creative Maturity Quotes

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

If you think about 2Pac, Biggie, and Nas, all of those guys were teenagers or in their early 20s when they got started. Everybody acts like young people have to be silly and lack perspective. Those guys had incredible perspective, and everything that they said was before 25 years old.

I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.

I love my genre films, but I think when I get older, the way I tell it will be very different to how I told it when I was in my mid-twenties, which is how old I was when I made the first 'Saw.'

I know that some of the great painters and some of the great artists didn't even start to 'peak', as you say, till they were in their fifties and sixties. And God knows, history is full of artistic people that weren't even recognized till they were dead and gone.

Just as it takes time for a speck of fish spawn to develop into a fully grown fish, so, too, we need time for everything that develops and crystallizes in the world of ideas. Architecture demands more of this time than other creative work.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

Later works are better because it takes a lot of time in architecture to mature. And, it takes a lot of discipline to experience everything that is changing around you.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

I think the more experience I have working on films, the more I can shed that character rather than carrying around that heavy weight.

If you are a creative person, then your mind gets sharper with age. My mind is very sharp, and I am happy for that.

I ain't drop an album since I was 25. I rap way better. I've experienced way more.

I have seen ups and downs. I am 10 films old. People say I have changed. But, I don't sense any change in myself. If I had to change, I would have changed in my second or third film.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.

if you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

I love to give the song away - it's so exciting - where, I think, a lot of younger songwriters, they struggle with that. And it's a big struggle, where they want the shine and they want people to know that it was their idea and it was their doing. But luckily, I've been through that, so I can just focus on helping other people do their thing.

If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Even reading my first bad review was an awesome experience. It was cool because you make something and not everybody's going to like it. I felt like that kind of grew me up a little bit into a professional. I was a student filmmaker, and no one writes reviews about student films.

I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.

Yes, maturity in life brings maturity to the music I make.

Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.

Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.