William Hazlitt Quotes

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.

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.

Intelligence is not creative; judgment is not creative. If a sculptor is nothing but skill and mind, his hands will be without genius.

He lives with his creativity in high gear.

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.

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

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups.

The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.

I've always been creating, no one had to teach me how to create, I always made things.

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.

Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.

At moments we are all artists.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

Normal people do not create art.

This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain.

Apparently one impression we are making... is that creativeness consists of lightning striking you on the head in one great glorious moment.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

I believe it is no wrong Observation, that Persons of Genius, and those who are most capable of Art, are always fond of Nature, as such are chiefly sensible, that all Art consists in the Imitation and Study of Nature. On the contrary, People of the common Level of Understanding are principally delighted with the Little Niceties and Fantastical Operations of Art, and constantly think that finest which is least Natural.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.