Sonny Rollins Quotes

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I create from a place of passion. It's like a pregnancy, where you create from a place of passion, and then it grows, and then before you know it, you want to push that baby out.

Art brings to life things that can seemingly be dead, and can put a fresh perspective on things that are living. It's so important we keep creating.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

I love to create. I love to make magic. I love to create the unexpected.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness... bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

I just like to stay creative. Anything that can keep my mind going.

I find it inspiring and I always think when I'm working on something new, whether it's a new kind of character or a new kind of story or new kind of camera, it gets my creative wheels spinning.

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

The imagination is how things get done. You have to cultivate creativity.

It used to kind of upset me when I'd be working on a part in my hotel room, and I'd get an idea for a song and find myself on the guitar for an hour when I should be working on my lines. But I've discovered that when I start to shake up my creativity it wants to be expressed in all kinds of different ways. They all kind of inform each other.

Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.

There is no end in creativity. Hence, to strive towards an end result is a fool's errand. Set goals, make music and paint pictures, but know that the crux of your happiness balances delicately on the wings of the act of creativity itself. Not at the finish line.

Another thing about creation is that every day it is like it gave birth, and it's always kind of an innocent and refreshing. So it's always virginal to me, and it's always a surprise. ... Each piece seems to have a life of its own. Every little piece or every big piece that I make becomes a very living thing to me, very living. I could make a million pieces; the next piece gives me a whole new thing. It is a new center. Life is total at that particular time. And that's why it's right. That reaffirms my life.

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

The intellect is not the means of creation, and creation does not take place through the functioning of the intellect; on the contrary, there is creation when the intellect is silent.

Small ideas that turn into big ideas - that really inspires me.

When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

Inspiration cannot be willed, though it can be wooed.

A creative moment is part of a longer creative process which, in turn, is part of a creative life.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.