Creativity and Inspiration

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.

The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person, its importance not being fully recognized for some time.

Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again.

The plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he begins.

Love is a good poet and accomplished in all the fine arts; for no one can give to another that which he has not himself, or teach that of which he has no knowledge. Who will deny that the creation of the animals is his doing? Are they not all the works of his wisdom, born and begotten of him? And as to the artists, do we not know that he only of them whom love inspires has the light of fame?

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

What is genius—but the power of expressing a new individuality?

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

No great discovery was ever made in science except by one who lifted his nose above the grindstone of details and ventured on a more comprehensive vision.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg— I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target . . . others cannot even see.

Genius is talent exercised with courage.