Ken Kesey Quotes

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

I think it's better to have ideas.

If it's worth remembering, I'll remember it. If something keeps coming back, if I keep thinking of that phrase, if I see manifestations of it at different times and different places, then I feel it's worth making a song out of.

A classic is a classic for a reason. Let's try to create new classics. The idea of repeating ourselves drives me a little crazy.

There's a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

All you need is your own imagination. So use it that's what it's for.

I think meditation helps greatly with creativity. If it's a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it's going to shine. It's going to resonate.

Don't be afraid to borrow if someone else has said it well. Winston Churchill said, The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. That's so well said. You could stay up all night and not think of that.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Creativity requires quite a lot of faith - not just in yourself but also in the knowledge that you have the right to proceed, even when you may not know exactly what you're doing.

Nobody needs a movie to give them an idea.

Wit is the god of moments, but Genius is the god of ages.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Music is something I really have a need to do - I don't seem to be able to stop

The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.

It seems to me that when I see nature I see it ready-made, completely written - but then, try to do it!

When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.