Jacques Barzun Quotes

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

For me, the creative process is this giant patchwork of information.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

I think that everything is part of creativity - the more you create, the more you have ideas, and the more you meet people.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

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?

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

It's not enough to tell people to be creative; they need to know how, and what to create.

I pick up inspiration from everywhere and it all manages to keep stored in my brain somewhere.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

All the things we have to remember, and I've mentioned this before, is that we're all artists.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.