Quotes by British Authors - Page 513

Before innovation - or practical creativity - there is insight. You must see the world differently.
Max McKeown
Innovation is about practical creativity - it's about making new ideas useful...
Max McKeown
As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas.
Max McKeown
Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.
Max McKeown
The psychology of individual creativity is about at least three different things. First, creativity is about thinking differently. Second, creativity is about feeling differently. Third, creativity is about focusing, or committing, differently.
Max McKeown
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar there is to new ideas.
Edward deBono
All creativity is a work in progress
Dean Cavanagh
creativity is our only weapon against entropy
Dean Cavanagh
We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.
Bertrand Russell
In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.
Richard Osborne
Creativity isn't a switch that's flicked on or off; it's a way of seeing, engaging and responding to the world around you.
Rod Judkins
The process of creation begins way before one starts writing.
Fennel Hudson
I like working among ‘creative clutter’. It gives me a sense of activity and achievement.
Fennel Hudson
Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.
Fennel Hudson
The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one’s mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.
Fennel Hudson
I admit to being prone to deep thinking, which – given that I’m emerging from dark times – can take me to some very sombre or profound places. But this is no bad thing. I always resurface wiser and with a way of viewing things that is different to before.
Fennel Hudson
Individuality and creativity are slowly dampened by a normal job with normal people.
Fennel Hudson
There’s no such thing as writer’s block, so long as you’ve had plenty of time to think about what you want to write.
Fennel Hudson
Eyesight can be so blinding. We need to look beyond the face of things.
Fennel Hudson
It’s frustration which makes creativity possible.
Hanif Kureishi
To flourish in any field of activity you need to gain a deep understanding of it.
Rod Judkins
Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.
Neel Burton
Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
Elizabeth Goudge
For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its true potential - the imagination.
Lawrence Durrell
Life is an adventure I am enjoying creating.
Jay Woodman
If you are open to change and welcome surprise, you know the secret of creativity and the secret of life.
Chloe Thurlow
… mess is the material from which life and creativity are built …
Ralph D. Stacey
A true conversation is a co-creation.
Sarah Rozenthuler
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it
Alain de Botton
As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
J.R.R. Tolkien
An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they’re creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can’t make it better.
Johnny Rich
Although the author dealt some of John Bunyan's conclusions in spiritualizing the details of Solomon's Temple, he attributes to Bunyan a "consecrated ingenuity".
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
It is the one who accepts commitment who is strong. The true commitment is the artistic one. This is why artists are so often attacked. They are attacked for their morals, for their ideas – even for their work. Yet their essence – their commitment – is the secret which is unassailable. The true artist knows that creativity is its own reward. Ordinary people fear commitment, you see. Ordinary people fear creativity. They know that if they allow that seething cauldron of yellow liquid to boil over within themselves, then their whole lives will be changed. People fear change. People do not wish to be creative and artistic in any real sense. They wish to decorate, perhaps, and to make things around themselves pleasant – but this has little to do with creativity. … All spiritual paths should be creative. Creativity is involved with sacrifice. That stew of yellow liquid which boils in everyone is a sacrificial broth …
Mark Hedsel
Self-expression has to come out pure. It has to have an environment waiting for it. It has to have a garden it can plant itself in.
Melinda Gebbie
And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.
Neil Gaiman
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.
W.H. Auden
Humans need to be a little crazy, spontaneous, unusual, free-flowing, and creative.
Stuart Wilde
Creativity is, in many respects, a response.
Matthew Syed
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Virginia Woolf
Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop.
John Fowles
I do not play this instrument so well as I should wish to, but I have always supposed that to be my own fault because I would not take the trouble of practicing.
Jane Austen
The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.
Helen Oyeyemi
I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself
Virginia Woolf
Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive.
Jhumpa Lahiri
We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . .
Tom Stoppard
There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.
Edmund de Waal
When there's no stimulus to be found on the outside, you have no option but to look inside yourself for inspiration, and when I did it set off a creativity that had always been inside of me, It mixed with my environment and life experiences to make something tangible,something that expressed me.
Bernard Sumner
The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR]
Alfred North Whitehead
Creativity is a combination of discipline and childlike spirit.
Robert Greene
I felt nothing change in the room, except the shock of my voice alone and the peculiar euphoria one feels in the wake of applause, feeling at once cheapened and triumphant.
Jessie Burton
Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.
Philip Sidney
Creativity is a clashing of opposites.
Graham Fink
The creative journey is not a trek through the wilderness, but actually a clearly defined path, which though not visible to our outside eyes, can be felt with our inner senses.
Lucy H. Pearce
If you were writing a book to be published, you might be restrained by the fear that your wild imaginings might drive some people crazy. As it is, you are free, you can go off in any direction whatsoever, so long as the flame in your mind burns that way.
Ted Hughes
The majority of boys think the highest form of creativity is weeing a pattern into snow.
Beth Garrod
In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.
Ted Hughes
There is a juiciness to creativity, a succulence that comes up from within, a sensuality which both produces and is soothed by the act and product of creativity. Creativity is pleasing to us on a deep level. Be it the feel of clay in our hands, the colors that make us feel alive as we knit or sew, the meaning that we find in the words that we write, the energizing feel of movement as we dance and the music moves through our bodies. Taking part in creativity helps us to be more fully alive on every level, it asks that we engage with life in a visceral, and interactive way.
Lucy H. Pearce
What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late.
Ted Hughes