1. Sergey L. Markov. Kvintological approach to the construction of a unified theory of creativity
Markov, S.L. (2012). Kvintologichnyi pidhid do pobudovy edynoi teorii tvorchosti [Kvintological approach to the construction of a unified theory of creativity]. Pravnychyi visnyk universitetu “KROK”, 11, 160 -171.
2. Sergey L. Markov. Сreative approach to security management
Markov, S.L. (2012) Tvorcheskiy podhod k upravleniiu bezopasnostiu [ Сreative approach to security management]. Izvestiia Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia [News of the Russian Academy of Education]. 2 (22), 403-415.
3. Sergey L. Markov. Creative management and management of creativity in the modern creatological formation
Markov, S.L. (2015) Tvorche upravlinia i upravlinia tvorchistiu v novitniy kreatologichnit formacii [Creative management and management of creativity in the modern creatological formation] In V.K. Gizhevskiy, S.L. Markov (Eds.), Legal and socio-psychological dimensions of modern information society (pp. 252-266). Кyiv: KROK University.
4. Sergey L. Markov. Formation of creative vision of an individual as the universal method of enhancing creativity
Markov, S.L. (2011) Formuvannia tvorchogo bachennia osobystosti jak universalnyi metod aktivizacii tvorchosti [Formation of creative vision of an individual as the universal method of enhancing creativity]. In S.D. Maksimenko & L.M. Karamushka (Eds.), Actualni problemy psichologii. Vol 1. (pp. 374-380). Kyiv: Publishing House “A.C.K”.
5. Sergey L. Markov. A genetic approach to the nature of genius
Markov, S.L.(2011) Genetuchnyi pidhid do pryrody genialnosti [A genetic approach to the nature of genius]. In 2th International scientific conference: Genesis of the personality's existence. Kyiv, 19-20 December 2011. Kyiv: Information and Analytical Agency, Vol.1, pp.255-260.
6. Sergey L. Markov. Mechanisms of creative dialogue with the World
Markov, S. L. (1997) Mechanisms of Creative Dialogue With the World. Paper presented at the 105th annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, August 17, 1997. Chicago, IL.
7. Sergey L. Markov. Sense creation in the structure of processes of meaning dynamics
Markov, S.L. (2013). Smyslotvorchist v structuri procesiv smyslovoi dynamiki [Sense creation, in the structure of processes of meaning dynamics]. Pravnychyi visnyk universitetu “KROK”, 15, 183-192.
8. Sergey L. Markov. Personal mechanisms of sense creation
Markov, S.L. Osobystisni mechanizmy smyslotvorchosti [Personal mechanisms of sense creation]. Pravnychyi visnyk universitetu “KROK”, 16. P.265-274
Sergey L. Markov. Kvintological approach to the construction of a unified theory of creativity
Abstract. The model and method for the construction of unified theory of creativity are proposed. The universal principle of the centered penta-structure was laid in the base of the theory formation. This principle allows to construct the system of coherent measurements and categories of creativity and to present a classical model of creativity in the form 4Ps / S - process, product, person, place as well as the sense which generates and integrates them. The deployment of these central categories leads to the creation of such relevant specific theories of creativity as a problem-solving process, productive activity, self-actualization, creative dialogue, creative vision and sensecreation.
Key words: unified theory of creativity, methodological grounds, kvintological approach, pentabasis, model of creativity.
Markov, S.L. (2012). Kvintological pidhid do pobudovy edynoi teorii tvorchosti [Kvintological approach to the construction of a unified theory of creativity]. Pravnychyi visnyk universitetu “KROK”, 11, 160 -171.
Sergey L. Markov. Mechanisms of Creative Dialogue with the World
Markov, S. L. (1997) Mechanisms of Creative Dialogue With the World. Paper presented at the 105th annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, August 17, 1997. Chicago, IL.
Abstract. The variant of theoretical framework that helps to harmonize and simplify modern creativity theory is suggested. The given conception is based on the idea of universal nature of creativity, and the existence of definite invariant evolutionary principles and mechanisms.
The framework is built on such universal categories as Interaction, Dialogue and Game. The answer to the question is not only “Where is? “, but both “How is?” creativity is proposed . Thus a hierarchical system of mechanisms is outlined to account for the creative dialogue that may occur between personality and the objective world. It is proposed that every level of creative interaction manifests itself through opposite, mutual complement pairs. These interactions constitute the workings of the mechanisms and include:
The axiological (Idealization vs. Problematization), cognitive (Decentration vs. Simplification), emotional (Identification vs. Meditation), behavioural (Self-actualization vs. Personification).
This unified system of opposite mechanisms manifests itself as a “double helix of creativity” and allows to consider process of bringing into existence as an assembly of complement elements and constructing to the whole.
The system of connected mechanisms allows the creative vision. It is an integral part of the creative attitude toward the world. It can serve as an effective method for the finding and solving of diverse life problems and conflicts, as a method of stimulating creative activity, or as a form of creative self-training and meditation.
Key words: framework for creativity, theories of creativity, creative dialogue, creative mechanisms, double helix of creativity
Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the universe and are appointed by Heaven.
I Ching (12th с. BC, Book of Changes, Chinese classic text)
The Creative knows the great beginnings. The Receptive completes the finished things.
I Ching
Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven
I Ching
Turn yourself not away from three best things: Good Thought, Good Word, and Good Deed.
Zoroaster (c.628 - c.551 BC) Persian spiritual teacher and philosopher
I am not an originator but a transmitter.
Confucius (551 - 479 BC), Chinese spiritual teacher and philosopher
He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Confucius
The Essence of Knowledge is, having it, to use it.
Confucius
Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.
Confucius
Where so ever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Confucius
Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.
Laozi (6c. BC), Chinese spiritual teacher and philosopher
From wonder into wonder existence opens.
Laozi
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Laozi
The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
Laozi
Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.
Laozi
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
Laozi
For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.
Laozi
Silence is a source of Great Strength.
Laozi
To see things in the seed, that is genius.
Laozi
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
Laozi
The master observes the world but trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. He prefers what is within to what is without.
Laozi
As soon as you have made a thought, Laugh at it.
Laozi
Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?
Sun Tzu (c. 544-496 BC), Chinese military general and philosopher, the author of The Art of War
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
Sun Tzu
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we create the world.
The Buddha(563 - 483 BC), Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
Heraclitus ( c. 535 – c. 475 BCE), Greek philosopher
If you do not the expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.
Heraclitus
The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.
Heraclitus
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC), Greek philosopher
The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.
Plato (427–347 BC), Greek philosopher
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
Plato
The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.
Plato
Life must be lived as play.
Plato
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), Greek philosopher
The soul never thinks without a picture.
Aristotle
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart.
Meng-Tse (Mencius) (372 – 289 BC), Chinese Confucian philosopher
He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man.
Meng-Tse
Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BC – AD 65), Roman Stoic philosopher
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let if first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
Epictetus (55–135 AD), Greek Stoic philosopher
The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.
Thomas Aquinas (January 28, 1225 –March 7, 1274), Italian Dominican priest, philosopher and theologian
Stillness is where creativity and solutions are found.
Meister Johann Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1327), German theologian, philosopher and mystic
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart
Children at play are not playing about. Their games should be seen as their most serious minded activity.
Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592), French writers
If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted.
Francis Bacon (January 22, 1561 –April 9, 1626), English philosopher
A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
Francis Bacon
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Francis Bacon
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 –February 11, 1650), French philosopher and mathematician
Doubt is the origin of wisdom.
René Descartes
It is not enough to have a good mind, the main thing is to use it well.
René Descartes
If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.
Voltaire (November 21, 1694 –May 30, 1778), French Enlightenment philosopher
Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Voltaire
I hold firmly to my original views. After all I am a philosopher.
Voltaire
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.
David Hume (May 7, 1711 –August 25, 1776), Scottish philosopher
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 –July 2, 1778), French philosopher and writer
All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
Immanuel Kant (April 22, 1724 –February 12, 1804), German philosopher
Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
Kant
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
Immanuel Kant
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 –September 21, 1860), German philosopher
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, - the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), American Transcendentalist philosopher, essayist
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely… but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude …
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is a happy talent to know how to play.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty, without expression, tires.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The two terrors that discourage creativity and creative living are fear of public opinion and undue reverence for one's own consistency.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813 –November 11, 1855), Danish philosopher
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Søren Kierkegaard
It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it.
Søren Kierkegaard
The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.
Mikhail Bakunin (May 30, 1814 –July 1, 1876), Russian philosopher and revolutionary
If one advances confidently in the direction of their dreams, and endeavors to lead a life which they have imagined, they will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862), American poet, transcendentalist philosopher
The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, Simplify.
Henry David Thoreau
Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.
Henry David Thoreau
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
Henry David Thoreau
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.
Friedrich Neitzsche (October 15, 1844 –August 25, 1900), German philosopher
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Has anyone...any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? ... There is an ecstasy such that the immese strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes... Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.
Friedrich Nietzsche
One hears — one does not seek; one takes — one does not ask who gives.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859 –January 4, 1941), French philosopher
To perceive means to immobilize. . . we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
Henri Bergson
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Henri Bergson
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952), American philosopher and psychologist
“…a problem well put is half solved.”
John Dewey
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead (February 15,1861 –December 30, 1947), English philosopher and mathematician
The 'silly' question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
Alfred North Whitehead
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana (December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), Spanish-American philosopher and essayist
To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.
George Santayana
Culture arises and unfolds in and as play.
Johan Huizinga (December 7, 1872 – February 1, 1945), Dutch philosopher and historian
Philosophy, for Plato, is a kind of vision, the 'vision of truth'...Everyone who has done any kind of creative work has experienced, in a greater or less degree, the state of mind in which, after long labour, truth or beauty appears, or seems to appear, in a sudden glory - it may only be about some small matter, or it may be about the universe. I think that most of the best creative work, in art, in science, in literature, and in philosophy, has been a result of just such a moment.
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872 –February 2, 1970), British philosopher
There are certain things that our age needs. It needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
Bertrand Russell
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Bertrand Russell
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
Creativity is the supreme mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new, hitherto unknown, derived from nothing, proceeding from nothing, born of nothing other....
Nikolai Berdyaev (March 18, 1874 – March 24, 1948), Russian philosopher.
True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Creativity is the mystery of freedom.
Nikolai Berdyaev
There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Philosophy… is the creative perception by the spirit of the meaning of human existence.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Creativeness is liberation from slavery. Man is free when he finds himself in a state of creative activity. Creativeness leads to ecstasy of the moment. The products of creativeness are within time, but the creative act itself lies outside time.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.
Nikolai Berdyaev
In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening.
Nikolai Berdyaev
In every artistic activity a new world is created, the cosmos, a world enlightened and free.
Nikolai Berdyaev
But man as a person, the same man, gains mastery over egocentric self-confinement by disclosing a universe in himself…Personality is a universe, it is filled with universal content.
Nikolai Berdyaev
Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old.
Nikolai Berdyaev
The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world.
Nikolai Berdyaev
We are standing on the threshold of a world-epoch of religious creativeness, on a cosmic divide.
Nikolai Berdyaev
…in the third epoch the divinity of man's creative nature is finally revealed and divine power becomes human power.
Nikolai Berdyaev
The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little…A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.
Nikolai Berdyaev
It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God's claim on and call to man. God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God.
Nikolai Berdyaev
This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being.
Martin Buber (February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher
Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation – we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.
Martin Buber
Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.
Martin Buber
Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (May 1, 1881 – April 10, 1955), French philosopher and Jesuit priest
A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
Jacques Maritain (November 18, 1882 –April 28, 1973), French Catholic philosopher
The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883 –October 18, 1955), Spanish philosopher
We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976), German philosopher
The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.
Martin Heidegger
Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (April 26, 1889 –April 29,1951), Austrian-British philosopher
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
All life is problem solving.
Karl R. Popper (July 28, 1902 –September 17, 1994), Austro-British philosopher
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
Theodore Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969), German philosopher and sociologist
True creativity often starts where language ends.
Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905 – March 1, 1983) was a Hungarian-Jewish novelist, philosopher, journalist
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and the pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.
Arthur Koestler
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five.
Arthur Koestler
The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
Arthur Koestler
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 –January 4, 1960), French philosopher
Great ideas, it is said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations a faint flutter of wings; the gentle stirring of life and hope.
Albert Camus
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Albert Camus
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928), American linguist and philosopher
We do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
Humberto Maturana (born September 14, 1928), Chilean philosopher and biologist
If you strike upon a thought that baffles you, break off from that entanglement and try another, so shall your wits be fresh to start again.
Aristophanes (c. 446 - c. 386 BC), ancient Greeks playwright
True wisdom consists not in seeing what is immediately before our eyes, but in foreseeing what is to come
Terence (195/185–159 BC), Roman playwright
Fortune favors the brave.
Terence
Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Rumi (September 30, 1207 –December 17, 1273), Persian poet and Sufi mystic
Inside you there's an artist you don't know about…Say yes quickly, if you know, if you've known it before the beginning of the universe.
Rumi
There is a community of the spirit. Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise. Drink all your passion, and be a disgrace. Close both eyes to see with the other eye.
Rumi
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Rumi
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly all the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–September 9, 1321), Italian poet (Paradiso)
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes (September 29,1547–April 22,1616), Spanish novelist
The earth has music for those who listen.
William Shakespeare (April 26, 1564–April 23, 1616), English poet and playwright
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.
William Shakespeare
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.
William Shakespeare
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
Matsuo Basho (1644 – November 28, 1694), Japanese poet
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 –October 19, 1745), Anglo-Irish satirist and essayist
A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (August 28, 1749 –March 22, 1832), German poet
Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you would create something, you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Talent develops in solitude, character develops in the stream of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I love those who yearn for the impossible
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
William Blake (November 28, 1757 –August 12, 1827), English poet and painter
To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
William Blake
The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
William Blake
What is now proved was once only imagined.
William Blake
I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.
William Blake
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
François-René de Chateaubriand (September 4, 1768 –July 4, 1848), French writer and politician
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 –April 23, 1850), English poet
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.
Friedrich Von Schlegel (March 10, 1772 –January 12, 1829), German poet and critic
Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), German poet and author
Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 –July 25, 1834), English poet
Prose, words in their best order. Poetry, the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
Stendhal (January 23, 1783 –March 23, 1842), French writer
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
Stendhal
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Byron (January 22, 1788 –April 19, 1824), Anglo-Scottish poet
Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not.
John Keats (October 31, 1795 –February 23,1821), English poet
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
John Keats
The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds.
Alfred de Vigny (March 27, 1797 –September 17, 1863), French poet, playwright, and novelist
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 –August 18, 1850), French novelist and playwright
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
Honore de Balzac
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Honore de Balzac
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
Honore de Balzac
What is art? Nature concentrated.
Honore de Balzac
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo (February 26, 1802 –May 22, 1885), French novelist, dramatist and poet
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
Victor Hugo
Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
Victor Hugo
Sunlight is painting.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864), American novelist
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret.
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849), American author and poet
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
Edgar Allan Poe
The true genius shudders at incompleteness -- and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not every thing it should be.
Edgar Allan Poe
Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
Edgar Allan Poe
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882), American poet
The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Tennyson (August 6, 1809 –October 6, 1892), British poet
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
Charles Dickens (February 7, 1812 –June 9, 1870), English writer
The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master- something that at time strangely wills and works for itself.
Charlotte Bronte (April 21, 1816 –March 31,1855), English novelist and poet
I never started from ideas but always from character.
Ivan Turgenev (November 9, 1818 – September 3, 1883), Russian novelist
Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.
James Russell Lowell (February 22, 1819 – August 12, 1891), American poet and critic
Those who love each other shall become invincible.
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892), American poet and essayist
Be not dishearten'd - Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet.
Walt Whitman
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot (November 22, 1819 –December 22, 1880), English novelist and journalist
Man is a creative animal, doomed to strive toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881), Russian writers and novelist
Beauty will save the world.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
…yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up. Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880), French writer
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
Gustave Flaubert
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
Gustave Flaubert
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Gustave Flaubert
The idea of beauty is the fundamental idea of everything. In the world we see only distortions of the fundamental idea, but art, by imagination, may lift itself to the height of this idea. Art is therefore akin to creation.
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828 –November 20, 1910), Russian writer
Art is a human activity which has as its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.
Leo Tolstoy
When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.
Mark Twain (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), American author and humorist
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Mark Twain
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark Twain
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
Mark Twain
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola (April 2, 1840 –September 29,1902), French writer
Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Emile Zola
If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.
Emile Zola
To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
Anatole France (April 16, 1844 –October 12, 1924), French poet and novelist
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
Anatole France
There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.
August Strindberg (January 22, 1849 –May 14, 1912), Swedish playwright and novelist
When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
Ellen Key (December 11, 1849 – April 25, 1926), Swedish writer
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 –December 3, 1894), Scottish novelist and poet
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 –November 30, 1900), Irish writer and poet
It’s not hard to get the ideas when they come. They just come... it’s painful waiting for them.
Oscar Wilde
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
It is personalities not principles that move the age.
Oscar Wilde
No great artist ever sees things as they really are.
If He did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
True alchemy lies in this formula: “Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse”.
Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 –November 10, 1891), French poet
The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought.
Arthur Rimbaud
A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.
Arthur Rimbaud
Imagination is the beginning of creation; you imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 –November 2, 1950), Irish playwright
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. George Bernard Shaw
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw
You see things and ask “Why?”; I dream things that never were and ask “Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3,1924), Polish author
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Joseph Conrad
The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.
Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952), Norwegian author
A word can be transformed into a coulour, light, a smell; it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.
Knut Hamsun
Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.
Knut Hamsun
The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.
Anton Chekhov (January 29, 1860 –July 15, 1904), Russian dramaturge and writer
Six principles that make for a good story: 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.”
Anton Chekhov
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov
When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me.
Anton Chekhov
If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.
Anton Chekhov
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
Anton Chekhov
What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941), Indian poet, writer, song composer, polymath
Write what you like; there is no other rule.
O. Henry (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), American writer
Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 –January 18, 1936), English writer and poet
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
André Gide (November 22, 1869 –February 19m 1951), French author
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valéry (October 30, 1871 –July 20, 1945), French poet, essayist, and philosopher
We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.
Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 –November 18, 1922), French novelist
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.
Marcel Proust
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 –December 16, 1965), British playwright and novelist
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham
A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.
W. Somerset Maugham
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary -- it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
Somerset Maugham
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
Somerset Maugham
The best style is the style you don't notice.
Somerset Maugham
Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946), American writer
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
G.K. Chesterton (May 29, 1874 –June 14, 1936), English writer
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
G. K. Chesterton
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.
G. K. Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
G.K. Chesterton
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 –August 12, 1955), German novelist
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Thomas Mann
Literature. . . is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Thomas Mann
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875 –December 29, 1926), Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist
The only journey is the one within.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
Rainer Maria Rilke
What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going into yourself and meeting no one for hours on end--that is what you must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.
Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), American author
Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak..surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.
Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877 – August 9, 1962), German-Swiss novelist and poet
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse
Knowledge is love and light and vision.
Helen Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968), American author
The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.
Helen Keller
The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.
Helen Keller
Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 –November 9, 1918), French poet and playwright
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 –March 28, 1941), English writer
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce (February 2, 1882 –January 13, 1941), Irish novelist and poet
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce
You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has not choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 –June 3, 1924), German-language writer
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.
Agatha Christie (September 15, 1890 –January 12, 1976), English crime writer
Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well.
Agatha Christie
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention -- invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 –November 22,1963), English writer
To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) American-British playwright, critic and poet
Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Only those that risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
There is no method except to be very intelligent.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
Henry Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980), American writer and painter
Writing is its own reward.
Henry Miller
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
Henry Miller
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
Henry Miller
No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.
Andre Breton (February 19, 1896 –September 28, 1966), French writer and poet
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.
Andre Breton
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), American author
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it -- three minutes; to collect the data in it - all my life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962), American writer
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
William Faulkner
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
William Faulkner
Our imagination flies - we are its shadow on the earth.
Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899c –July 2, 1977), Russian-American novelist
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau (July 5, 1889–October 11, 1963), French poet and novelist
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975), American playwright and novelist
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961), American author and journalist
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest Hemingway
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
Ernest Hemingway
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges ( August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), Argentine short-story writer
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Jorge Luis Borges
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
Jorge Luis Borges
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every writer "creates" his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Jorge Luis Borges
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
Jorge Luis Borges
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900 –July 31, 1944), French writer and poet
It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action that man finds his supreme joy.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon (February 13, 1903 – September 4, 1989), Belgian writer
We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
Irving Stone (July 14, 1903– August 26, 1989), American biographical writer
Dance first, think later
Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906 –December 22, 1989), Irish avant-garde novelist and playwright
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
Samuel Beckett
A man who is a genius and doesn't know it probably isn't.
Stanislaw J. Lec (March 6, 1909 –May 7, 1966), Polish poet and aphorist
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
Eugene Ionesco (November 26,1909 –March 28, 1994) , Romanian playwright
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
Eugene Ionesco
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 – February 12, 1984), Argentine short story writer
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992), American author
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919 –February 8,1999), Irish-born British author
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
Surprise is where creativity comes in.
Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012), American fantasy and science fiction writer
You fail only if you stop writing.
Ray Bradbury
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
Life is "trying things to see if they work.
Ray Bradbury
Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love.
Ray Bradbury
A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (January 5, 1921 –December 14, 1990), Swiss author and dramatist
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007), American writer
To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.
Kurt Vonnegut
It’s much more important to write than to be written about.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (born March 6, 1927), Colombian novelist
I need, therefore I imagine.
Carlos Fuentes (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012), Mexican novelist and essayist
Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
E.L. Doctorow (born January 6, 1931), American author
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E. L. Doctorow
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E.L. Doctorow
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike (March 18, 1932 –January 27, 2009), American novelist, poet, literary critic
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932), Italian semiotician, philosopher and novelist
Artists are those who can evade the verbose.
Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949), Japanese writer and translator
For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
Haruki Murakami
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
J.K. Rowling (born 31 July 1965), British novelist
Without cunning, there is no innovation. Without ambition, there is no accomplishment.
J.K. Rowling