Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Artists, like yourself, are born with a need to express that's just innate.

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before. Creation brings satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take organized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty.

It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain....A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.

I want to feel creative when I'm working. I don't want to just work for the sake of working.

In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. He also wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this "child in man" is the immortal creator within him.

Everybody's creative. We create our songs and our paintings, our families and our children. Every one of us is on the cutting edge of the future.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers -- of persistence, concentration, and insight -- to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.

Everybody's got creativity. Dive within to the ocean of infinite creativity.

I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught.

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.

There is an ocean of creativity within every human being.

Every human being is an artist

Be the artist you were born to be.