Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncans death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

The would-bees take their honey from the flowers of creation.

Man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down hill.

In creating, the only hard things to begin; A grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

I see the creative accomplishments of which highly gifted humans are capable as special cases of the universal creative process, that game played by everyone against everyone else, from which wells up all that has never been before.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.

He who does not know how to create should not know.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square: but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

There is a great gulf between the really creative person and normal people. The totally creative person does not have the rest of his life in proper proportion.

What was any art but a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself-life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.

The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed.

Creativity is a by-product of hard work. If I never have another really new idea, it won't matter.