Creative Inquiry Quotes

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

I write books to find out about things.

I remember, working on 'Lost,' I learned very quickly the way that I had to approach the material or even ask the director questions. It was always prefaced with, 'Would it be wrong for me to assume?' Because I didn't know where my character on 'Lost' was going.

I'm not Michael Moore. I think Michael Moore wants to tell you how to think. He wants to give you answers. I make movies to raise my own personal questions and not to give answers.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

I have always just made things. I don't see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.

An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.

I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'

You're trying to find new ideas in people. I always think to myself, what question I am least comfortable asking the person? And then I make sure I ask it early in the interview.

I've always been on a quest to use science in an artful way.

Every time I get a role, or the opportunity to explore a role, I look at it, and I think, 'What is the story we're trying to tell here?'

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

Education must, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

I'm not the kind of actress who asks a lot of questions of my directors unless it's something I really need to know.

Science is not an intelligence test. Intuition is important, knowing what kind of questions to ask. The other thing is a passion for getting to the core of the problem.

My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.

Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination.

Art is supposed to hold up a mirror to its audience and ask, 'What do you believe? What do you think? What do you feel?' and if you look at a painting and it makes you feel nothing, that's a feeling as well.

In fact, I think more broadly about what an audience requires, but I want an audience to be fascinated by the process of finding an answer, or finding out there isn't one.