Quotes by British Authors - Page 512

, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it couldnever have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely becauseit might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.
G.K. Chesterton
Forgery, being the weirdest form of creativity there is, like antiques, costs lives. Why is it that antiques demand sacrificial victims? Dunno, but if they don't get enough, forgery does. You want proof? Here it is: Once a faker's found out, he dies. Truly. It always happens.
Jonathan Gash
It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott
A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.
Anthony Burgess
It is a burden...(M)ake no mistake about that. Any great gift or power or talent is a burden and this more than any, and you will long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law."- Susan Cooper ("Merriman" The Dark is Rising)
Susan Cooper
In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse.
Robert Fripp
We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that.
Simon Pegg
The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.
Jacob Bronowski
One should not confuse creativity with whining.
Silvia Hartmann
When I think of normality I think of mediocrity
Gillian Anderson
Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.
Max McKeown
He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
John Cleese
If the spirit of wonder & curiosity stays alive in us, then surely we will always have new questions, and always expand our creativity in response?
Jay Woodman
If the rock band U2 had been born in Orange County, California, would they have become just another church worship band?
Steve Turner
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
Alain de Botton
The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things.Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us.On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena.But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.
Kenneth Grant
I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one's sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.
Jay Woodman
I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: "living & dying, we feed the fire.
Clive Barker
Hallo, Pooh,” said Rabbit.“Hallo, Rabbit,” said Pooh dreamily.“Did you make that song up?”“Well, I sort of made it up,” said Pooh. “It isn’t Brain,” he went on humbly, “because You Know Why, Rabbit; but it comes to me sometimes.”“Ah!” said Rabbit, who never let things come to him, but always went and fetched them.
A.A. Milne
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
Jeanette Winterson
Edward Gibbon, in his classic work on the fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Roman era's declension as a place where "bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
Edward Gibbon
You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe - which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of ;unsatisfied love; - and so it may be indeed - for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die. I know many poets who write only when in an exalted state of mind which they compare to ;being in love;,when they do not simply state, that they are in love, that they seek love - for this fresh damsel - or that lively young woman - in order to find a fresh metaphor, or a new bright vision of things in themselves. And to tell you the truth, I have always believed I could diagnose this state of ;being in love; which they regard as ;most particular;, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, ;item;, one graceful attitude of body or mind, ;item;, one female history of some twenty-two years from, shall we say 1821-1844 – I have always believed this ;in love; to be of something of the most abstract masking itself under the particular forms of both lover and beloved. And Poet who assumes and informs both.
A.S. Byatt
Those who seize the day become seriously rich.
Richard Koch
People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.
Piers Anthony
I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.
Neil Gaiman
Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.
Cory Doctorow
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.
E.M. Forster
It is not commercial success but originality and proof of autonomy which are admired.
Angela Phillips
Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.
Edgar Douglas Adrian
Producing works of art doesn't often count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or chemistry, does. So why is it that in universities writing about novels is thought to be a higher intellectual calling than writing novels; or rather, if writing novels is not thought to be intellectually valid, why is writing about them?
Ken Robinson
It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.
Anthony Storr
If there’s a single idea I emphasize when people ask about writing, it’s that there’s no right way to produce a book. But I do think that whatever you do, you should do regularly, whether it’s waking up at midnight and drinking vodka or waking up at dawn and drinking tea, whether it’s sitting in a monkish study or writing on the back of a flatbed truck. The analogy I like is children’s literature: in a lot of children’s books, there’s a huge institutional structure (Hogwarts, for example) whose presiding safety allows the children’s imagination to run free. The more consistent your habits are – and this ties into having your tools nailed down – the more secure your brain will be to run free and create.
Charles Finch
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Peter Medawar
It's not a sign of creativity to have sixty-five ideas for one problem. It's just a waste of energy.
Jan Kaplicky
Rest nurtures creativity, which nurtures activity. Activity nurtures rest, which sustains creativity. Each draws from and contributes to the other.
Kim John Payne
My advice would be to write-never to stop writing, to keep it up all the time, to be painstaking about it, to write until you begin to write.
Gabriel Fielding
Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.
David Mitchell
And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.
John Ruskin
Don't Stop Searching Until You Find Creative & Gainful Unemployment
Dean Cavanagh
YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOUR IDEA IS ANY GOOD the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings isnot as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us—because what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.
Hugh MacLeod
Don't be afraid of silly ideas.
Paul Arden
We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage...
Max McKeown
All change begins with someone having a thought.
Paul Morley
And so it was that Michael built a brown castle on the peak of his mountain, Gabriel built a golden pyramid in the midst of his plain, saying it was both a holy temple in my praise and an edifice that would guide him on his pattern for his future work, though I knew that only he would ever understand it, to my amusement, and Raphael built a silver palace to sparkle above the trees of his forests, as his home and celestial workshop, and I was well pleased with their work, as ever it was better than what I had hoped for. "That was the First Age, the Archangel Age, long over. I can speak in much detail about each stage in my creation, and my scribes have written all my words on each stage in the books I gave to the angel courts, for study and meditation and for prayer, but such details are for my sons and daughters most interested in them, when they are of an age, with the understanding, to comprehend such things.
Philip Dodd
The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.
Stephanie Lennox
In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...
Susi Moore
Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Colin Wilson
Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.
Christopher Hitchens
High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.' - John Cleese
Paul Arden
I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.
Clive Barker
The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.
Rupert Sheldrake
Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.
Ian Leslie
Problem-insight precedes solution insight. Someone has to recognise a problem before they start to solve the problem...
Max McKeown
If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas.
Max McKeown
Plug into the anti-obvious power of the rebel. Or get those opposing minds to plug into your purpose, to solve your problem, to reimagine your process.
Max McKeown
The true parents of creativity are curiosity and necessity.
Max McKeown
If traditional doesn't work, then traditions won't do.
Max McKeown
He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.
Claire Tomalin
Innovation can start with wanting what does not yet exist - and finding a solution - or seeing what does not yet exist - and finding an opportunity.
Max McKeown