B. J. Novak Quotes

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans.

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, 'Just watch!'

There's nothing I liked visually of the period I was a child. There was no dream in it, and nothing sparkled.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

Imagination comes of not having things.

True creativity often starts where language ends.

I'm the laziest inventor you ever met. My inventing is in my head - I don't have to be in the lab working and sweating.

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

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas - and new connections between ideas - lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you into the darkness.

I live for the blank page.

Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.

I loved painting and drawing for many reasons. One of them was that all it really required was me, a pencil and a pad. It was something I was passionate about, and still am.

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.

Creative freedom is a huge carrot.

It is always possible to create something original.

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.