Joseph Campbell 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.

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

It's inspiring just to work on something and just kind of keep the creative juices flowing.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

Like all artists, I go through creative spurts.

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

Failures in art usually lead to something else interesting.

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

I have no imagination; I just steal from life and change the color. Then it's a comic book.

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative....the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

It may sound affected - but it is the act of creation itself, and it is equally exhilarating whether one is working on a teaspoon or a national bank.

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

Serious art is born from serious play.

But there's nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do.