Samuel Johnson Quotes

We've always tried to inspire ourselves, so to speak. In the beginning, that could mean just hearing your own songs played back to you for the very first time.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It's like falling in love.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.

Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination.

I get inspired at different times and in different ways.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

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.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

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

You never know where your influences are going to come from, or where you're going to find your inspiration.

All this talk about inspiration and moment is nonsense.

An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.

My whole life, I've always had to be surrounded by creative things. I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.

I believe that anything in this world is fair game for a creative exercise.

Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.

I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.

My very first movie, 'Mary Poppins,' which I talk about, it just turned me into an obsessive, creative creature who had to sort of reply to the experience by drawing things, making things. It was like it forced - it made me into this obsessive, creative creature... I don't know any other way of putting it.

The artist is inherently a romantic to some degree, and as such, I believe in a muse. But I don't try to analyze too much where it comes from.