Elif Safak Quotes

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.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

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

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

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

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

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

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don't know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it.

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

Creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have. It is, for example, and this may surprise you, absolutely unrelated to IQ, provided you're intelligent above a certain minimal level.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

You make something from things that have happened and from things that exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, and you make something through your invention that is truer than anything true and alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

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

The art, the new, the ability to connect the dots and to make an impact - sooner or later, that can only come from one who creates, not from a teacher and not from a book.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

There's something about coming up with something out of nothing. I work with somebody else's creation already, and I just try to make it better.

You can't buy vision, and you can't buy aesthetic.

You must be very creative in our business. Creating in this business is making something new, but it is also touching on something old.