Authentic Creativity Quotes

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.

No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.

Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.

Artists are all giving so much of ourselves to the work and the people and the press and the media and Twitter and all that now. For me, being able to create from a genuine place is really difficult lately because there's so much going on all the time, but when all that stuff gets quiet, you can explore your ideas without any ego or mental chatter.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

If you want to be an artist, truly try to write what you believe, and if you write when you don't believe then you should try to become an actor.

Artists make art for themselves. Art is an honest expression. Artists who pander to their fans by trying to make music "for" their fans make empty, transparent art. The true fan does not want you to make music for them, they want you to make music for you, because that's the whole reason they fell in love with you in the first place.

If you work at rap and look at it as an art, the money will come. But if you try to get the money, it'll just always be shallow.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.

Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousn ess.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

I am very aware now that music is a business, but there is also a way to go about making music that is true to yourself as opposed to doing, you know, just going through the motions and making things that would just be commercially successful.

To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.

I want people to see my movies. My talent, my sensibilities are what people want to see in the movies... While I have the talent to make the kind of movies people want to see I want to continue to do that, keep making big pictures and make what I love. I’m really just making the films I want to see. There’s not a strategy.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

If your creativity comes out of your silence, out of your Zen, out of your meditations, then it is authentic, original. If it comes only as an occupation because you are feeling lost and there is nothing to do - a long holiday, so you start doing something... That is not coming out of your silences, it is coming out of your crazy mind.

The highest prize we can receive for creative work is the joy of being creative. Creative effort spent for any other reason than the joy of being in that light filled space, love, god, whatever we want to call it, is lacking in integrity. . .

He [Bernardo Bertolucci] has the kind of talent that breaks one's heart: where can it go, what will happen to it? In this country we encourage 'creativity' among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow 'too much.' Well, Before the Revolution is too much and that is what is great about it. Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

Artistic honesty sometimes prevents an artist from being born.

I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.