Marilyn Ferguson Quotes

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

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

Everything is raw material to me. Land is raw material... I take one form and transform it into other forms.

That's what I find so special: when you actually imagine something. But really, when it comes to you in a dream, and then you can bring it to life on the screen, it's very powerful.

Artists love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.

I made a creativity out of that messiness.

No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.’ But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

I'm intrigued by the dark. Out of darkness comes creation.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

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.

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

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

I think if you speak to any creative person, there's something so powerful - so intoxicating, if you will - about discovering another voice, another instrument, another way of looking at things, another way of perceiving things.

Chaos can be incredibly creative.

I'm always creating. Whether I'm writing a lyric or making a beat, every day I'm doing something.

I try to make things that are fresh and different, even if they are inspired by classic things.

I make things complicated for myself and chaotic, so I feel unsettled, and then the challenge is to make something structured and complete emerge from that.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

There are some projects where you have to just start doing it, and, after a while, the show starts telling you what it wants to be. You put your spirit in and, after a while, something bigger takes over, and it turns out to be much more fun and creative than what it was at the beginning.