Charles James Quotes

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

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

Creativity is a form of knowledge.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

Creativity is just connecting things.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.

I love the creative process. That's always been the closest thing to my heart, creating something.

The more you reason the less you create.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

The creative process is mysterious; a conversation, a ride in the car, or a melody can trigger something.

I want to spend my time between the creation of ideas and the creation of things.

When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

I almost literally wake up in the morning starting to think of my next idea. It's almost always driven by what's in the news. The hard part, really, is getting from knowing what I want to say to figuring out how to say it in an image. I'm still not entirely sure how to explain how that happens... Suddenly, something just works.

I always knew that I wanted to be creative, that I wanted to create something.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.