Creativity Decline Quotes

When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.

Truly novel inventions emerge only in one's youth. Later one becomes ever more experienced, famous-and foolish.

The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

I don't like the fact that no one has any imagination anymore. It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone. Nobody wants you to think about anything new or use your brain or make anything interesting because everything important has already been made. America is over; it's done being brilliant.Everything genius has already been built, like all the great works of art have already been produced.

People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.

Sometimes when you've got too much money you lose your imagination.

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

Although technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, it has also ensured the erosion of imagination.

You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.

It's a funny thing because you look at the careers of other filmmakers, and you see them sort of slow down, and you realize, maybe this becomes harder to do as you get older. That's sort of a cautionary thing. I hope it doesn't happen to me.

It's almost as if creativity is dead. The visual power of advertising was everywhere - now it's basically gone.

Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to.

This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, 'What are you doing this Saturday?' and they'll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, 'Man, I'm really into remote-controlled steamboats.'

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.

Lampoon ran out of steam in the early '80s, and wasn't able to reinvent itself because it ran out of talent. People who wanted to do this kind of stuff could suddenly make $100,000 in Hollywood right out of college.