Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?

I don't understand how people live without creating.

Art is both creation and recreation.

One of the most important reasons for living is to do something - live outside of yourself and put together an idea, an idea that you want to explore and then complete... Awaken your creative sensitivities!

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Trying to force creativity is never good.

I'm constantly making exhibitions in my head.

I'm interested in doing everything and anything that I can to squeeze that creativity out of my brain. I guess I'm sort of a performance rat.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

I just find my creativity manifesting a bunch of different ways.

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn't thought of before and that aren't talked about in the news all the time.

Art is giving to what you create a soul.

That's what I love more than anything, just creating.

You just get satisfaction from achieving something that you just don't get in any other way than from being creative.

I enjoy being creative.

I have been inspired by countless artists over the years, but there's also times when you just gotta make your own inspiration.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

My intention is not to make clothes. My head would be too restricted if I only thought about making clothes.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow… The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.