H. L. Mencken Quotes

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

There's this feeling of creativity in Iceland.

I think when you're being creative, you still attach it to reality somehow.

In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror - indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.

Music & Fashion; it all comes from the same place of creativity.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Art is the child of Nature.

But there's nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.

There are two types of genius; one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth.

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.

I take references from the past and flip them.

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Art revolves around creating something that isn't there.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.