Creative Renewal Quotes

People who are creative, who do it as a lifestyle, it's kind of silly to make that claim you're done, because you just never know when that spark is going to hit you again. You can't necessarily predict how you're going to feel. In ten years I'll be 58, and I might still feel like making a punk record.

When you are creating to the magnitude that I try to create, your brain is like a computer, and you need to refresh.

I love acting, but being an actor for hire only serves so much, and then you want to fill your well up again and be charged by something else.

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.

Every time I start a film I feel like I'm starting the first time, ever.

Yes's whole career was never really planned in any sort of way. It's always sad when a member leaves, but it's exciting when someone new comes in, and that regenerates the freshness of the band.

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

I tried so many different musics. I kind of burned out on classical and wanted to make it fun again. I started playing with indie bands and country bands and finally realized electronic music brought my style to life.

The minute you start assuming that the audience is very happy to see the same show again, you're dead.

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

I think sometimes with new characters, you can kind of hit a creative valley, and it's important to recognize when you're in that valley so you can get back out and get back to that peak.

Woody Allen stayed so good because he never left New York. Howard Stern stayed so good because he never left New York - Mel Brooks when he just got out of New York was doing 'Blazing Saddles;' when he left New York he started doing stuff like 'Robin Hood Men In Tights' - he was in L.A. too long. He lost the edge.

I've been starting in new places year after year after year. It's just like when I went to Greece or the Philippines. I love when people think I'm a new artist. It's a chance to start over.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

I'd love to do more 'Nighty Night,' but that's always down to commissions, really. It's weird as well because everyone's moved on. I don't know if I could get all those people back.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

At first, I am giving energy to the creation, but later the creation seems to be giving energy to me.

I do like to work with young directors because it's such a difficult business that I think after directors have been around a while sometimes, not always, but sometimes their passion gets siphoned off because they get hurt.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

The way Yes works is when we have a new member come in, as in Jon Davison, it's appropriate that we see what differences we can get out of a new contributing member in order to keep Yes interesting.

I wouldn't have been in the mind-set to do another 'Fly.'

I think if you have a series for a long time, it's in some ways like being in a play with a long run - in that the character stays the same - and so you are constantly posed with the challenge of making it interesting and unique week after week, year after year.

You have to constantly change and evolve because people get bored. Look at The Undertaker: he's evolved so many times.

'Honey' was the first song I wrote where I was really enjoying myself again after questioning the idea of being an artist.