Quotes about Creativity and Art

Creativity Art Quotes

No Path

“So, if you want to help your community,
if you want to help your family,
if you want to help your friends,
you have to express yourself.
And to express yourself, you have to know yourself.
It’s actually super easy.
You just have to follow your love.
There is no path.
There’s no path till you walk it,
and you have to be willing to play the fool.”
🎥  Ethan Hawke | Give yourself permission to be creative | Ted

Screwing up

“The only original thing we do is screw up.”
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“You can be taught to do any craft, any art the way it’s been done for all of history. You can repeat what all the masters did before you. You can be taught how to play all the great compositions.. perfectly. But it’s been done. I have the feeling the only thing we each can do that’s original is screw up in our own unique way. Have accidents happen, make mistakes, and from those mistakes, figure out how to make it work.”
🎥  Billy Joel – Q&A: Innovation Vs Being Commercial? (Hobart & William 1996)

A destructive myth

Amanda Palmer – Tim Ferriss

TM: “…Quite a few artists in different disciplines, who are afraid if they take their pain away they will not be able to create.”
AP: “Yes that is such a tyrannical and destructive myth”
-Amanda Palmer

Valuable steps

AP: “I believed in that myth for a really long time. I was a super self-destructive self-styled artist bohemian weirdo and my teens 20s and well into my 30s and you know I still have my moments but I really bought it I was like I need to have a dangerous destructive life of sex drugs and rock and roll so I can be awesome and have great things to write about and my pain is valuable. And I feel like if you are an artist maybe if that’s the door you come in through great that’s

1. yes your pain is valuable, good, like starting kit.
2. your pain is valuable to others, that’s like master level”

Washing machine metaphor

TF: “You can use your pain without always allowing your pain to use you. For using a metaphor from meditation: If experiencing your pain and being and being driven by your pain and be reactive to your pain is being inside the washing machine you can actually do a better job of seeing what is inside by zooming out 12 inches and being outside of the washing machine.

Use your pain

And that allows you to use the content of your suffering to use the content of your pain while having a better understanding of it and being able to shape it like a sculptor so you can better wield it and impart it to other people.”
-Amanda Palmer on Creativity, Pain, and Art | The Tim Ferriss Show

Fundamentals of creativity

“The heart of creativity is the ability to see differently. If you can’t see differently then there is no way you’re gonna be able to do anything differently. Which means perception is fundamental to creativity. In fact, perception is fundamental on everything that the brain does.”

Finding patterns

“First, it finds patterns in the world. Those patterns are inherently meaningless. There is nothing inherently valuable in these relationships that we discover in the world but first, we have to discover those relationships. That’s the first thing we do.”

History relationship

“The second thing is we have to add meaning to those relationships. That meaning is grounded in our history of what that stuff meant before. What we know from neuroscience is that this means when we open our eyes we never see the world as it is, we never see the information that falls into our eyes because that would be meaningless. We never, in fact, see patterns. What we see is the meaning of patterns. And that meaning is inherently grounded in our history.”

Stepping into uncertainty

“It is a very straightforward logical process of asking questions, shifting space of possibility and the brain instinctively putting to use together that actually are juxtaposed in space and time and that is the way we are creative. So the point is then what we really need to do in order to be creative is undergo an actual logical process of asking questions, stepping into uncertainty, using metaphors to explore this new space and most fundamentally challenging what we think to be true already to have an awareness of what our assumptions are.”
-Beau Lotto
”Is creativity actually creative?”

Creative commons

“No one can do to Disney Inc. what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm”

Royalties against creativity

“An intellectual Commons at cultural Commons where people could freely take and build. It was a royalty-free zone. It is a culture that you didn’t need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. It was built on a constitutional requirement that protection is for a limited time and it was originally limited 14 years in 1790, then in 1831 it went to 42, and then in 1909 it went to 56, and then magically starting in 1962, look no hands, the term expands 11 times in the last 40 years… It has been extended for existing works, not just for new works that they are going to be created but existing works.”
–Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons

Social media collaboration for creatives

“The idea of collaboration is so important within the creative industry. And as an artist, it is really easy to get quite closed off, want to protect your art, keep it to yourself, keep it locked down and not let people in. But to be successful and to grow as an artist you really have to open up. You have to let people in. You have to get that constructive criticism, that feedback, the second opinion which ultimately help you as an artist being a more open-minded person.”
–Maisie Williams about her creator-centric app Daisie

Creative thinking education

“Since so many people are saying, so I assume they are right, I am not sure, is that what we need in our 21st-century workforce are people who have incredible collaborative skills, who have incredible flexible ways of thinking, great imagination, and who can be innovative. Now if we have the whole population of citizens who can do those things, we all gonna have an economic crisis.

Performing art

So what I am thinking about is that’s very odd because those very skills of collaboration and flexible thinking and imagination and innovative thinking is exactly what the performing art teach us.”
–Yo-Yo Ma – The Aspen Institute – Photo credit: Judith Jockel

Deadlines under constraints

“…sometimes, the psychology of humans is — when you know you have no time, and you know you need to converge, there is this magic moment [that’s] hard to explain. There is an alchemy that makes everything [happen] and suddenly you find the right solution. It comes from pressure, so we need deadlines. At some point, you realize that you can do better and want to do crunch.”
-David Dedeine Creative director “A plague Tale: Innocence”

Primary pursuit

“You can try and fuel all your passions and creative projects, but doing so will slow the development of your primary pursuit.”
-John Patrick Weiss “How To Avoid The Renaissance Man Trap”

Finding your tribe

“I considered calling this finding your niche but it’s more important than that. It’s deeper than that it’s about looking 0for like-minded individuals and in order to do that you have to understand yourself you have to figure out what really defines you as a person and once you find those like-minded individuals it’s about pulling them together into a new community and so I call it finding your tribe.”

like-minded individuals

“I had found yet another part of my tribe like-minded individuals who understood the things that meant something to me that led to another burst of creativity”
–Heather Dale
“How to find a tribe that loves your art: Heather Dale TedX

Simplicity

“If minimalism requires you to do a simple thing very well and I think simplicity is deceiving. The more simple something becomes the harder it is to make it perfect.”.”
-John Roelofs, framer Curvelinespace

Not in control

“I have to make objects in such an O.C.D. way. When everything is lined up, it starts to have its own logic and I have no control over it. That’s another way for me to be dominated by objects. I like that when objects start to have its own life – like you cannot control and all of a sudden I realize that is very much what I’m experiencing in my life.”
–Aki Sasamoto
(Art21 New York Close Up – An artist walks into a Bar)

Strong beliefs weakly held

“if Obama is telling you your product is crap, it doesn’t matter unless he’s a customer. You must listen to your customers but everyone else is just noise. So when I was saying in the beginning that you need to have strong beliefs weakly held this is the this is kind of the weakly held bit you need to have very strong beliefs about what you think people want and what you think you need to build but used to have the humility to actually listen to customers and iterate and change what you thought was needed to make sure that you are actually building something that people want.”
-Alice Bentinck
Co-founder of Entrepreneur First

Purpose

“If you’ve done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do?
I think that’s where life stops.”
-Rutger Hauer
-The AVC
-Photo: Alamy

Something bad about you

To make it simple, Eugene was using this quote from X in order to use the fact, he is from Singapore as a strength. The video is really funny and instructive.
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“This quote came to mind: “if something is said about you, prove it right” like whether it’s bad or good. “Prove it right!” it seems counterintuitive like if someone says something bad about you, you prove it right, what does that mean? (…) So let me explain what this quote means and what I got from it: so if someone calls you fat, and you don’t like it, you can do what Meghan Trainor did. She knows she is fat, so she made a song about her being fat, and now no one laughs at her.”
–Eugene Soh
“The dude who became an accidental artist” Tedx

Suffering

“Somehow we’ve completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know – I’m not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it’s odious. And I also think it’s dangerous, and I don’t want to see it perpetuated into the next century.”
– Ted2009 Your elusive creative genius – Elizabeth Gilbert