Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

The thing I wonder about is where does Brian's creative spark come from? Not his subjects or anything, but his spark. What makes it so great for me is that I really don't know. There's a mystery behind Brian, even to me.

Telling people how to be creative is easy - being creative is difficult.

A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.

If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.

With the word creative we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light - by grace, one feels, rather than deserving, for it always is something given, free, unsought, unexpected.

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.

We have got to abandon the sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

He lives with his creativity in high gear.

Upper berth, lower berth, that's the difference between talent and genius.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

Always think that in any area of the arts, you get maybe ten percent of people who are creative, original... and the rest are generally following on, copying.

When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.

I'm a creator at heart.

There's nothing new, even 'new' is inspired by something. We're all, either consciously or unconsciously, we're inspired.

I've always been creating, no one had to teach me how to create, I always made things.

Paul Cummins is a genius. He's a true visionary.

All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

We are apt to consider that invention is the result of spontaneous action of some heavenborn genius, whose advent we must patiently wait for, but cannot artificially produce. It is unquestionable, however, that education, legal enactments, and general social conditions have a stupendous influence on the development of the originative faculty present in a nation and determine whether it shall be a fountain of new ideas or become simply a purchaser from others of ready-made inventions.

You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful toneis silenced.

I have a creative mind, so if I listen to the song, I have an idea, I thought of five or six months ago, I'll bring it back into the playing field. I can tweak ideas or make them better. Just come up with something and then we go from there.