Quotes by British Authors - Page 514

This is the crux of being a Creative Mother. It is more than how many jumpers you have knitted, or having an exhibition in a fancy gallery, or a bookshelf of your own books. It is about the act of living authentically whilst honoring your mother self and creative self. About saying yes to life, every part of your life, and finding how to weave them all together.
Lucy H. Pearce
Catching creativity is like catching butterflies – fast-flying, bright-colored sparks darting here and there, it requires quick wits, good eyes and desire to net them. And once you have them, you need to act fast. An idea, like a butterfly doesn’t last long: it is ephemeral. It is here, and now it is gone – so quick, grab your laptop, your pen and paper, your Dictaphone, your sketch pad, whatever your mode of expression or recording, swoop and catch.
Lucy H. Pearce
Together we are learning to move from raw emotion and frozen muscles into a flow which emerges deep from within. We are learning to dance our prayers, bleed our words onto the page, laugh our images onto canvas, build our dreams in the world – to transmute and transmit the energy of the Feminine through our bodies and out into the world.
Lucy H. Pearce
Creativity is a flame that lights up and ignites the senses
Suzy Davies
The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.
Geoff Dyer
Because I came to seeThat I should never have been a first-rate potter.I didn't have it in me. It's strange, isn't it, That a man should have a consuming passion To do something for which he lacks the capacity? Could a man be said to have a vocation To be a second-rate potter? To be, at best,A competent copier, possessed by the cravingTo create, when one is wholly uncreative?I don't think so. For I came to see, That I had always known, at the secret moments,That I didn't have it in me. There are occasionsWhen I am transported- a different person,Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation,And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it.But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment-That state of utter exhaustion and peaceWhich comes in dying to give something life...
T.S Eliot
Creative people depend on the generosity and graces of strangers.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Turn your thoughts to novel writing—narrative, let it be about what it will, is read, because the mind quietly acquiesces, and it requires no trouble to think about it. On your part it will demand much less care in the composition. Never mind improbabilities—put together a sufficient number of facts—the more unlikely the better. If you are too idle to choose the trouble of inventing, collect eight or nine of the most popular works of that sort; take a piece of one, and a piece of another, and put them together, only a little altered, just to disguise them: never mind whether what the painters call keeping, can in this motley assemblage be attended to; nobody thinks about that: sprinkle the whole plentifully with horrors of some sort or other, to stimulate the languid attention, and you will have a certainty of a sale at least among the circulating libraries, which, after all, is the principal sale that can be expected; for who buy novels?—Who indeed buy books at all in these times?
Charlotte Turner Smith
Creativity involves provocation, exploration and risk taking. Creativity involves "thought experiments." You cannot tell in advance how the experiment is going to turn out. But you want to be able to carry out the experiment.
Edward de Bono
We’re making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.
Clive Barker
Dialogue reminds us that we can question to build, not only to doubt or deconstruct.
Oli Anderson
The bright light of brilliance keeps the darkness away, but it can be so very exhausting.
Fennel Hudson
I’m a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There’s no middle ground, only madness and sadness.
Fennel Hudson
...innovation is highly context-dependent. It is a response to a particular problem at a particular time and place. Take away the context, and you remove both the spur to innovation, and its raw material.
Matthew Syed
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which does not. For example, Dawkins compares the 'blind watchmaker' of natural selection with the real human one. 'A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection . . . has no purpose in mind'.I think this distinction is wrong. There is no denying that the human watchmaker is different from the natural one. We humans, by virtue of having memes, can think about cogs, and wheels, and keeping time, in a way that animals cannot. Memes are the mind tools with which we do it. But what memetics shows us is that the processes underlying the two kinds of design are essentially the same. They are both evolutionary processes that give rise to design through selection, and in the process they produce what looks like foresight.
Susan Blackmore
It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.
Elizabeth Goudge
Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don’t let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, “honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.” Good to remember…
Elif Shafak
She was an object lesson on the essential luck, whatever hardships may come their way, of those born able to make things.
Diana Athill
All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.
Joseph Conrad
Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.
Max McKeown
Own your creativity. You are creative with the same juice that flows in all of life. The question is not whether you are creative enough but whether you will free yourself to express it.
Ian Roberts
Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art...I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
Quentin Crisp
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss
Brian W. Aldiss
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.
G.K. Chesterton
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.
G.K. Chesterton
There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
Edward de Bono
Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.
Edward de Bono
If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas ... and I have thus found remote analogies and relations which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis.
Kenneth J.W. Craik
My head was a desolate place and as barren as the bare hills of Le Marche. Until I began to build in it, only vultures nested there.
Lisa St. Aubin de Terán
GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS. THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.
Hugh MacLeod
The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.
Lisa St. Aubin de Terán
The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.
Robert Greene
We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.
Edward de Bono
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man's soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
Quentin Crisp
They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?
Hugh MacLeod
The human spirit lives on creativity and dies in conformity and routine.
Vilayat Inayat Khan
Creativity is a gift. It doesn't come through if the air is cluttered.
John Lennon
If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case. So dust off your horn and start tooting.
Hugh MacLeod
You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
Humphrey Carpenter
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order
Virginia Woolf
The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.
Hugh MacLeod
The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.
Robert Greene
Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
John Cleese
Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
Ken Robinson
Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler
I dream in fire but work in clay.
Arthur Machen
Routine kills creative thought.
Scarlett Thomas
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Arthur Koestler
Creativity is as important as literacy
Ken Robinson
If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be pat
Hilary Mantel
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
Ken Robinson
And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?
David Hewson
The world won't end with a bang or a whimper. It'll end with the death screams of a thousand demons and a defiant, carefree, savage, wolfen howl.
Darren Shan
If mankind's destined to bite the bullet, let's bite it and be damned.
Darren Shan
There is no getting away from the past or from one’s destiny.
Laxmi Hariharan
What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.
David Hewson
You have the right to chose your destiny, otherwise you will be left to live someone else's idea of what your life should be.
Steven Redhead
You are the creator of your own perceived reality. Don't be a creation of circumstances. Always take full control of your destiny.
Steven Redhead
Destiny is variable, not fixed; it is forever changing depending upon your free will to make choices for what you want your life to be.
Steven Redhead
I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore...it's in the stars!
Ian McEwan