The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

The creative person wants to be a know -it -all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth -century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.

The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

The good ideas are all hammered out in agony by individuals, not spewed out by groups.

The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

The legs are the wheels of creativity.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought.

Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible -- he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.

It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

The power in which we must have faith if we would be well, is the creative and curative power which exists in every living thing.

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

Creation is a drug I can't do without.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow. When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven.

Out of nothing can come, and nothing can become nothing.

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy-the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.

The person who can combine frames of reference and draw connections between ostensibly unrelated points of view is likely to be the one who makes the creative breakthrough.

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.

The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.