Julio Cortazar Quotes

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

Over time, naturally, you lose your innocence from gaining knowledge. You can't be innocent forever, but there's something in innocence you need to regain to be creative.

I've always tried to retain that childlike wonder.

The main thing about SpongeBob is that he celebrates innocence. His outlook on life is very optimistic and earnest, and I think kids relate to that. He has a creative spark in the same way children are very creative from an open and naive perspective.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

I think I still keep my sense of wonder, which I call childlike, not childish, childlike. I still have a vivid imagination, and I like to try a lot of new things.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

It's essential that a part of you not grow up. Childhood wonder gives us our spark and beauty.

We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.

Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life. They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there. They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought - sometimes it isn't much, either.

A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative . . . or they are crazy.

I think it's important for people to realize that we were all young, all naive, and also we had lived in a time that had magic.

Don't be too dismissive of children. While it's true that few children are artists, all artists are children.

The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan.

My innocence didn't always help me, but it did preserve something in me that maybe others don't have anymore. I'm inside my bubble, you could say, and thankfully so, because I don't think daily life is always great. It protects me.

Picasso painted with passion, Mozart composed with it. A child plays with it all day long. You may think you’ve lost your passion, or that you can’t identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.

If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?" "Walls can't think!" "That doesn't stop them from caring.

You know if I see a work that really I am very affected by and inspired by then it makes me want to try things with my work that maybe I hadn't considered trying before and I think that is the biggest complement that you can pay somebody.

I think Allen [Ginsberg] was a person who's like a child.

Most actors are very deeply passionate about their line of work. I suppose there are probably people who sell insurance policies that are passionate about it, but I'm thinking the ratio is a little higher for actors. But, I may be wrong.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

I try to convey this feeling of being innocent in a mystical state, being in a place that's new, seeing things with brand new eyes, for better or worse. I just imagine this little kid floating on a beautiful king-size bed over the city at night, seeing all sorts of crazy stuff happening in the world. To me, half the fun is all the stories other people have.

I don't like the idea of [having] a thick skin. I think we [should] be more childlike.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.