Nikos Kazantzakis Quotes

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

Science and art have that in common that everyday things seem to them new and attractive.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

You can't buy vision, and you can't buy aesthetic.

Creativity is a lot like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope. You look at a set of elements, the same ones everyone else sees, but then reassemble those floating bits and pieces into an enticing new possibility.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it’s our job to do it one better.

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

Intelligence is composed mostly of imagination, insight, things that have nothing to do with reason.

Creativity is a great motivator because it makes people interested in what they are doing. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. Creativity gives the possibility of some sort of achievement to everyone. Creativity makes life more fun and more interesting.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.