Lukas Foss Quotes

Any creator owes a debt to past creation.

Most inventions are based on some prior history.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

The arts have always been in and around my life.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea. Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea... Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from, and that's interesting.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I get inspired at different times and in different ways.

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience. I never know who's influencing me at any time.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Most creative work is a process of people passing ideas and inspirations from the past into the future and adding their own creativity along the way.

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

You either create something and you keep it a secret and you die with it, or you can benefit the craft.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

Indeed, I would feel that an appreciation of the arts in a conscious, disciplined way might help one to do science better.

I don't look at other people's work because I don't want to be distracted by their ideas.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary in the process.