G. H. Hardy Quotes

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and lofiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.

My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

If artists do have ideas, they're often not great.

I work in a creative industry. My work isn't terribly hard, it's artistically explorative, so I have no complaints.

Creativity is basically a feminine process. I'm convinced that we have in our soul, everybody, this masculine side and this feminine side. So at the end of the day, you always use this feminine creative energy to write or to do any type of art or creativity. So if I see that my protagonist is feminine, it's not more difficult, no. And even when my protagonist is masculine, I'm writing from using this feminine energy.

Depression is the flip side of creative inspiration but it can be useful. It's telling you to stop for a little bit. You can become so fully absorbed in the world of creative work that it can lead to some imbalance in your life.

Mozart never composed anything, ever! He copied what was written on his soul.

I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.

I don't want to be on the phone talking numbers and budget. I want to be creating a world.

I love directing because you get to see your film come to life. You get to work with the actors. There's something magical about each piece of it.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.