Charles Mingus Quotes

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest.

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

I love creative people.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

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

I have never been an innovator, a creative genius.

There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

Inspiration and genius -one and the same.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

Talent works, genius creates.

Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they'll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that's really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that's tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, 'Yeeaaaah - masterpiece.'

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery.

The vast masterpieces of art, business, science, and humanity were not constructed by practical people.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any.

The source of genius is imagination alone.

There is the same difference between talent and genius that there is between a stone mason and a sculptor

Genius may be for an hour or a thousand years; its indispensable quality is continuity with the life-push.