Quotes & Sayings About Creative Arts

We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in this country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it's time to show us at our best. — Leontyne Price

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts ... Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. — Northrop Frye

Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed.
The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society - the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These are the "idols" of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people. — Rollo May

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry
if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that "eighty percent of success is showing up." NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) teaches kids how to show up again and again. — Jonah Lehrer

To me, my parents are my mom and dad, and we were able as kids to do a lot of cool things. Just being part of that family definitely brought out and cultivated the creative arts in us. — Brooklyn Sudano

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives. — Aberjhani

As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts. For art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color. What freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and a spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society. I see of little more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist. — John F. Kennedy

I think television goes through phases, like other creative arts, where suddenly a group of people are producing exciting work all at once. — Kenneth Branagh

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. — Kurt Vonnegut

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent. — Honore De Balzac

Always think that in any area of the arts, you get maybe ten percent of people who are creative, original ... and the rest are generally following on, copying. — Hugh Hopper

Everyone needs a creative outlet to express themselves, and the arts in school provides that. — Amber Riley

No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity. — Faith Ringgold

Our Nation has a diverse and extremely rich cultural heritage. It is a source of pride and strength to millions of Americans who look to the arts for inspiration, communication and the opportunity for creative self-expression. — Gerald R. Ford

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. — Steven Pressfield

Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic. — Vivianne Crowley

Any day that we are privileged to work at the chalk face is a good one," Van der Huffen replied dryly.
"We should pay the Department for the privilege," Bruce Smith, Head Teacher Creative Arts and Languages, replied.
"I believe that many of us have; the coin is sweat, fat, and tears. — Christine M. Knight

The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases - Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath - the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign - creative people tend to live a long time - sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully ... because some of that stuff may not be dead. — Stephen King

We grew up in a very creative environment and were exposed to the arts at a very young age, so it's not a surprise that all of us are in some form of the arts. — Spike Lee

Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion. — Tom Althouse

Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression. — John Darnielle

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less. — Jonah Lehrer

In the creative arts you draw a special power. The discipline required is awesome to be an actor or an actress, to be really good, not just another one waiting tables. — Frederick Lenz

It's very hard to reach people in Greymouth with pottery or any form of art because they're allergic to it. Allergic to it ever since they began really because they've taken from the ground in the mining spirit without making or creating, and therefore anything that is creative they do not understand. — Theresa Sjoquist

Last Saturday night I was in a club on the South Side of Chicago listening to live rock music and talking to a guitar playing veteran of the music scene in the city. He looked and talked like the musicians that I recall from my childhood; he was a thin, cigarette smoking, avant garde and interesting guy. We got to talking about a life in the relatively risky creative arts and he said, "Look, you could get that safe job and spend your whole life that way, but what are you waiting for? When you're ninety-six years old and have three days left? Is that when you decide to do what you love? — Jamie Freveletti

That's the very definition of freedom: to be allowed to develop our own creative potential to the fullest. But it doesn't have to be in the arts, obviously. In my case, I gravitated toward the arts. — Martin Donovan

Writing, I am convinced, is the least appreciated of all the creative arts. Only a miniscule portion of the population engages in sculpting or painting or composing but everyone writes - whether it be letters, invitations, shopping lists...It is not far-fetched, therefore, for anyone with a smattering of self-esteem to believe that if he or she had the time, and the desire, an acceptable book or article could be produced. — Og Mandino

I do want to have that feeling that people are actively involved in something, rather than just consuming something. I suppose that's what it comes down to, because it's such a dominant capitalist society, everything becomes a consumer product. And I don't think that's really appropriate to the creative arts, really. — Jarvis Cocker

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.
This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He's also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective. — Peter Sims

Success financially is a measure of creative success, it is the same in all arts. — Stella McCartney

School was hard for me. If there had been a school for the creative arts, I might have thrived, but ... I needed that creative outlet so much. Also, I'm just bad with numbers. — Amy Adams

It's our responsibility for the village to say, 'Hey we're going to create these programs,' whether it's sports, creative arts, music, we need some things to give young people positive things to do, and that's including jobs. — Common

Really, whatever I was seeking and looking into in those days like creative arts, chant, the muse being in touch with the muse for poetry and writing and music. It's all part of the spirit and if we look particularly at Hinduism and Buddhism, the tantric stream of those traditions totally embraces all aspects of human life and life on this world. — Surya Das

It was the arts, those noble expressions of the human spirit that are communicated through literature, dance, song, film, drama, painting and sculpture, among the many other such creative means, that helped articulate the sufferings of [these] people that were heard around the globe. — Bill Cosby

In engineering, as in other creative arts, we must learn to do analysis to support our efforts in synthesis. One cannot build a beautiful and functional bridge without a knowledge of steel and dirt, and a considerable mathematical technique for using this knowledge to compute the properties of structures. Similarly, one cannot build a beautiful computer system without a deep understanding of how to "previsualize" the process generated by the code one writes. — Gerald Jay Sussman

There are different types of talents and intelligences, and traditional schools sometimes ignore the creative ones. It is important for us to give kids every platform for them to find what they are good at and what they love. The arts also provide a space for newfound creativity. — Caity Lotz

We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to rot in his chains. — Irving Stone

The traditional arts and crafts are, in fact, "mysteries," with "secrets" that are not merely "tricks of the trade" of economic value (like the so-much-abused European "patents"), but pertain to the worldwide and immemorial symbolism of the techniques, all of which are analogies or imitations of the creative nature in operation — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art. — John F. Kennedy

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean? — Paul Weller

The simple everyday experiences become the doorway to new thoughts and inspirations. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I think the arts are absolutely necessary for children to be creative and express themselves because every child is different. — Kym Whitley

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life. — Ethan Hawke

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design. — Michael Foley

There's a high school in Camden, New Jersey, I call the Jill Scott School. It's the Camden Creative Arts High School. Those teachers and kids are so passionate about what they do, and 98 percent of the senior class went on to college. — Jill Scott

So for me the creative world isn't what you do after your day job, though many professional musicians do this to make ends meet, but it's something that IS a job. Perhaps that's why I'm not as disheartened by the more cold blooded aspects of the industry. Over the course of watching my mother navigate the creative world I've seen just about every trick pulled that could have been and I've seen her deposit the checks received for a job well done. When I recently asked her why she chose the creative world she said: "Early on I decided that if I had to work I was going to work at something that I loved."

I'm glad she did. As difficult, chaotic, dysfunctional and crazy as the world in music and the arts can be I always knew that they mattered deeply to her, as they do to me. — Jamie Freveletti

I think that in itself is kind of an amazing achievement to be able to say that your full-time career is in any creative arts, let alone a show that has kept people interested for coming on four seasons and hopefully more. — Anna Paquin

I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component. — Kate Forsyth

Feed your creative mind.
Feed your joyful, selfless heart.
Feed your soul to grow.
Feed with books, music, painting or arts,
Feed with your special favorite passion
you joyfully share near or far apart. — Angelica Hopes

I love puppies, and I love animals in general. Besides that, I do martial arts: extreme martial arts. I also play real guitar and drums, and sing. And I'm taking some college classes, hoping to major in English and creative writing. — Cameron Monaghan

You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction. — Henry Rosovsky

When I talk about "creative living" here, please understand that I am not necessarily talking about pursuing a life that is professionally or exclusively devoted to the arts. — Elizabeth Gilbert

In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo - the "Way of the brush" - while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado - the "Way of flowers." Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular. — H.E. Davey

I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind. — Jacob Bronowski

Creativity is discontent translated into arts. — Eric Hoffer

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy. — John Baldacci

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside. — Lawren Harris

The value of an artist is more because of his originality than his skill. — Amit Kalantri

I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing. — Anna Journey

What I feel I can do is help people become aware of how pervasive and extensive the arts are, how they affect each one of us in our daily lives - what kind of [buildings] we live in, what kind of clothes we wear, what we see with our eyes. We are often blind to the beautiful things around us. What I'm mostly concerned about is how often we're blind to our own talent. I think that within each human being there is a creative spirit, and some of us have been fortunate enough to have good teachers and parents who've brought this out and encouraged it, but others haven't. — Joan Mondale

I consider myself fortunate that in my home, acting or the creative arts were a good option. This was a respected tour of duty in my family. Acting wasn't something that was left to tragic bohemians. But we weren't a family that obsessed on cinema. — Sean Penn

While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative ... the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember. — Twyla Tharp

Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lampshade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. — Virginia Woolf

We've all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that's been my life. I've always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently. — Andre Hueston Mack

An artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Oklahomans value our children and our seniors. Oklahomans value traditions of faith. Oklahomans value our heroes, our veterans. Oklahomans value innovation and the creative arts. — Brad Henry

Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to imagine possibilities and then turn those possibilities into realities. Evident in the gifts of civilization - in our arts, languages, sciences, technologies, businesses, governments, and so on - it is clear that we are a profoundly creative species. Yet many of us only access a smidgen of our creativity. — Scott Edmund Miller

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. — Virginia Woolf

British innovation in design, in the creative arts, in engineering and manufacturing is world class. — Margaret Heffernan

Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it. — John Kinsella

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation, or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts ... — Madeleine L'Engle

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. — J.M. Roberts

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness ... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour. — Richard Eyre

Involvement in the arts engages kids in their community, improves self-esteem, reclaims at-risk youth, and builds the creative skills that are required of a 21st century workforce. — Gavin Newsom

Creative Arts raise a person to another level of consciousness as if you could imagine life before words. — Charlie Haden

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)] — Neil Gaiman

It's the kind of democratization of the Internet that has led to the breaking down of barriers into the creative arts. — Kevin Spacey

I think there's a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it's only fashion, that in the end it's only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions. — Suzy Menkes

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act. — E. M. Forster

Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career. — E.A. Bucchianeri

To put it simply, we need to keep the arts in education because they instill in students the habits of mind that last a lifetime: critical analysis skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity and to solve problems, perseverance and a drive for excellence. Moreover, the creative skills children develop through the arts carry them toward new ideas, new experiences, and new challenges, not to mention personal satisfaction. This is the intrinsic value of the arts, and it cannot be overestimated. — Rod Paige

If I wasn't an actress I'd definitely want to do something in the arts and something that was very creative. — Nikki DeLoach

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books. — Stephen King

The proliferation of creative power can transform the world for all of its inhabitants. — Timothy Simpson

Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. — William Deresiewicz

Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for. — Heather Watts

But as a Scot with a lifelong love of Scotland and the arts, I believe the opportunity of independence is too good to miss. Simply put there is no more creative an act than creating a new nation. — Sean Connery

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts. — Jacques Maritain

The rapidly evolving global economy demands a dynamic and creative workforce. The arts and its related businesses are responsible for billions of dollars in cultural exports for this country. It is imperative that we continue to support the arts and arts education both on the national and local levels. The strength of every democracy is measured by its commitment to the arts. — Charles Segars

It's an artist's right to rebel against the world's stupidity. — E.A. Bucchianeri

The Arts and their supporters pointed out that, far from just lifting the poor out of poverty, universal ownership of molecular fabricators could, in terms of material possessions, give everyone everything they needed and leave everyone free to pursue their dreams and full potential, whether academic, physical or creative. There it was, right there. The pursuit of happiness, made reality.
This revelation gave even the most hardened cynics pause for thought. — K. Valisumbra