Julia Cameron Quotes

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

Creativity is an act of defiance.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

Not to be boxed in, to be able to transcend boundaries: for an artist, it's essential.

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.

I'm a complete deviant. All creative work breaks new ground.

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.

There's not much room for deviation, yet if you manage to crack it, there then you can express things that actually do sound unique and genuinely original.

Trust your creativity.

Creativity is the ability to see and to respond.

Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.

Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world's necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it. To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.

My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

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

True creativity often starts where language ends.

I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.

I love people who break boundaries and always create something new and fresh.

It's an infinite creative universe to explore so why chase conservative options?

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.