Mary Oliver Quotes

Society may shun bohemia, may put it down, may consider it useless and ineffective, but it is where everything cooks and boils and is created.

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

I love to create magic - to put something together that's so unusual, so unexpected that it blows people's heads off. Something ahead of the times. Five steps ahead of what people are thinking.

Creative people do not belong in the university because the process is antithetical to the analytical process so necessary for proper scholarship.

I think that all creative people are a little bit nuts.

Acting is a creative process, and directing and music. I think creative people - and I take myself as a creative person and it doesn't mean you have to be an actor, a musician, or a painter - but I think if you are in a creative profession or a creative business you do have a heightened awareness.

I just want to be as creative as I possibly can.

I think that most people have deeply creative sensibilities.

There's a stark difference between the words 'prodigy' and 'genius.' Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do.

I just like being creative, whatever way I have to do it.

Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.

The creatives are rarely professional and the professionals are rarely creative.

The right creative act makes its own laws, and always will do.

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

In the fetus, or a really young child, all the different brain areas are connected to each other, diffusely. And as the brain develops, the excess connections are turned off, so you get very specialized areas. So most people have really specialized talents. What happens in creative people is this pooling doesn't take place.

Thanks to the critics and thanks to the Emmys, we got all sorts of great reviews and notices and awards, at the start. Part of it is that it's great fortune to have something to live up to, but as creative people, we all have to just put that aside and go forward, make the best product we can, have as joyous of an experience as we can, and really remember that the spirit of this was to surprise the fans with something that they didn't see coming.

Creative risks will always outweigh technical mistakes.

A good many people think as I do. If they like my work they are creative . . . or they are crazy.

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

Creative vision creates art" - he motioned around the gallery - "that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's beautiful thing." "Or some sort of madness", she said.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

Personally, I rather think that if you're not creative you've got a problem on your hands. If you are creative you've got a double problem.

One of the things that kept me out of trouble was doing something creative - creativity can't be judged.