Creative Career Quotes & Sayings

You have to be willing to get back on that horse and try it again if the mood strikes. That was one of the great pieces of wisdom that I got early on in my career in terms of being blocked. If you get to a creative roadblock, you can sit there and rack your brain. — Dave Koz

I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right ... People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember "horizontal careers"?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are
and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). — Po Bronson

DeathWish: You spent some time working with Courtney Love and Billy Corgan on a creative level, how did this experience help your growth as an artist?
EA: It didn't
it stunted it entirely. I gave up over a year of my life and career helping Billy with his flop of an album and designing and building all of the costumes for his music video. With Courtney, we were friends, but I spent years working to record and promote her flop of an album only to find that my value increased every time I peed in an orange juice bottle so that she could fake her way through a drug test. Not exactly a haven for artistic growth. — Emilie Autumn

When I ask my parents, it's incredibly obvious I was going to have a creative career at an early age. I've been forever telling stories since I was very young. — Sophie Kennedy Clark

If you're a young actor, unless you're on a very short list at the studios, we have to be very creative about moving your career along. Otherwise, all we can do is hope to get lucky and find that perfect role that pops you into stardom. — Patrick Whitesell

I just really enjoying creating in general; I used to also write stories and play music and do different crafts, but illustration ended up being the creative outlet that I focused on for my career. I feel like illustration gives me the flexibility to tackle more abstract or loose ideas, as well as just enjoy the process of putting time into developing a skill. — Julie Dillon

I always wanted to have a career that would keep me at home in New York so I can work in the theater all the time and be involved in the creative process from the ground up. — Bobby Cannavale

There hasn't been one moment in my career where I felt I didn't have any control over the creative aspects of my records. — Enrique Iglesias

Some people want fame, popularity and huge sales. I've always hoped to have a really long career. So I've tried to make each of my creative decisions and business decisions to allow for longevity. As a side effect I got really famous and really big. I didn't realize the two could go together. — Jewel

I don't know if I have a career or not, or where it ends or it begins. I have been working, doing what I do for a long time. But my creative process has always been so tortuous. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century. — Steve Erickson

I had always attended classes and written stories as a creative outlet because I need that, and I thought, in my previous career in a model, the way I approached that was that I believed I was telling a non-verbal story. — Jessica Clark

I started my career giving a clinic in bad acting in the film, "The Silver Chalice," and now I'm playing a crusty old man who's an animated automobile [in "Cars"]. That's a creative arc for you, isn't it? — Paul Newman

You shouldn't strategize your career if you're in a creative realm. You can't either. I love the unknown. I love the element of surprise. I've always felt really inspired by it. I love the spontaneity of the job. I think you can't really fight against it. — Emily Blunt

If you want to be creative in your company, your career, your life, all it takes is one easy step ... the extra one. When you encounter a familiar plan, you just ask one question: "What ELSE could we do?" — Dale Dauten

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day ...
To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way. — Terri Windling

My agent and I try to be picky with roles so that I can drive my career in different directions and be different, creative characters. I want to be an actor for the rest of my life and to have fun with my career. So I told him that I wish I could do a movie that already has a fan base. And then 'Twilight' came along! — Kellan Lutz

If I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative. — Dean Koontz

Bruce Springsteen really got any creative person's dream career, and his good-heartedness and good-spiritedness are part of it: both because it made the people behind the scenes want to do their jobs that much better, but it also means that he connects with an audience in a way that holds them close. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

This has been a long and tiring battle for 10 years. And I'm glad it's finally resolved. My principles and reputation as a creative artist were involved here-it wasn't just about the royalties. I can now look foward to getting on with my career. — Irene Cara

Recently, Lady Gaga was motivated to take the helm of the creative direction of her career and as such I decided to step away. I am extremely proud of her, and in stepping away I wish her all the best. — Laurieann Gibson

My whole creative career is a product of the Internet ... I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account. — John Hodgman

Career-wise, I feel very lucky to have always been able to follow my creative path. — Alison Jackson

Most designers and creative agencies, no matter their industry niche, will do some nonprofit or cause-related work at some stage of their career. This work helps us create a sense of purpose that is bigger than us. It connects us to our community, helps us leave a legacy and be part of something bigger than our own work. — Peleg Top

One of the defining things about my career on camera is I like to play different characters. That gets difficult to do. People don't trust you to do something different. In animation, it's all about trust and how far can you go away from yourself. It's a really marvelous environment that's extremely creative. — Diedrich Bader

I'm not ambitious when it comes to my acting career. I'm not breaking down my agency's doors or sending out headshots. Even when I'm offered work, I always want small parts. When it comes to things that other people have written, I just don't know what I'm doing. I'm terrible at memorizing a script and reading lines. I get confused and I don't understand and it just looks fake to me. It's more difficult for me to be creative that way. — Amy Sedaris

I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov

I want to be able to manipulate and control my career from the creative side. — David Henrie

Design is a career where you learn creative decision making. — Biz Stone

I love acting. Acting is a true love of mine, acting and math. Although they are both creative, they use very different sides of your brain. And I love both. Acting is my first love, and that's my main career, it really is. — Danica McKellar

I fell into this business by accident. It wasn't something I ever aspired to be: an Actress . It just happened. It has evolved into an insane passion ... a creative outlet. But nothing more. It's my hobby ... one of the ways I express myself as an Artist . And the day it becomes a job ... a career ... I will quit ... — Shailene Woodley

When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself: to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay. Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim." He gave her a sharp look. "At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I must express. People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap - particularly when you're young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression. — Charles De Lint

You have to be prepared to give creative work 150%. I hear a lot of young people talking about life/work balance, which I think is great when you're in your 30s. If you're in your 20s and already talking about that, I don't think you will achieve your goals. If you really want to build a powerful career, and make an impact, then you have to be prepared to put in blood, sweat, and tears. — Ellen Lupton

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

It's funny because the voice-over world is definitely another career. It's another outlet to be creative. But, I'm just not invested, in the way that I am with film and television. — Emmanuelle Chriqui

For such a career I lacked both endurance and inclination:
the stress of ambition left me cold,
while the Muse, the creative spirit, was forever urging on me
that haven of leisure to which I'd always leaned.
The poets of those days I cultivated and cherished:
for me, bards were so many gods. — Ovid

I'm not saying you can't do writing, just do some writing that you can build a career on. Creative writing isn't going to get you anywhere. — Francesca Zappia

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky. — Orson Scott Card

If you want to be a creative person, then you're gonna have to be creative in how you put your career together. There isn't a path. Part of the creativity is making your path. — Alec Soth

I do love being solo because I can have more of my own creative input to every aspect of my career. — Rachel Stevens

You've got to run your career. What happens is a lot of times artists have this talent and they're just looking for somebody to take it and do something with it. And you have to be the creative force. — Will Smith

I have a music career as well, so I was going to either be an actress or a musician. Then, I did both. But, I was always going to do something creative. — Zooey Deschanel

Do you mind even a little that you are still addicted to people-pleasing, and are still putting everyone else's needs and laundry and career ahead of your creative, spiritual life? Giving all your life force away, to "help" and impress. Well, your help is not helpful, and falls short. — Anne Lamott

Hough I was creative, I also liked math and science. At Knox College, I studied creative writing and earned a degree in chemistry, thinking I would attend medical school. Ultimately, I decided that a career in nursing would allow more time for pursuing other creative interests. While I worked as an RN, I wrote stories inspired by my patients, designed t-shirts, and made hand-painted sandals. — Mary Pope Osborne

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. — Douglas Adams

I have people who come up to me and say, 'Oh, seeing your work in my little home town in the middle of nowhere on the internet inspired me to move to London, or New York and pursue a creative career.' It makes me quite emotional. — Kesh

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. — Tim Kreider

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. — Alain De Botton

Unfortunately, "learning" is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution. It's what managers fall back on when they fail to achieve the results we promised.Entrepreneurs, under pressure to succeed, are wildly creative when it comes to demonstrating what we have learned. We can all tell a good story when our job, career, or reputation depends on it — Anonymous

I started my career as a journalist, writing about science and technology for 'Business Week' magazine. Then I decided to make a career shift. I went to graduate school in computer science, and I began developing educational technologies - in particular, technologies to engage children in creative learning experiences. — Mitchel Resnick

For a creative person starting out on a career, try not thinking about film or media or whatever. think about money. — Paul Arden

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview] — Ray Bradbury

I believe that a creative career is only as good as the risks that you take with it. — Cate Blanchett

I did pose for 'Black and White' magazine, a prestigious, artistic publication, several years ago ... I did this as a piece of art and make no apologies for the creative decisions I've made as an artist in my 20-year career. — Andrea Thompson

Telling stories has been a compulsion of mine since I could physically say, 'Once upon a time ... ' But in high school, I realized I could study creative writing in college and actually pursue it as a viable career. — Victoria Aveyard

I've always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn't until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting. — Sufe Bradshaw

I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination. — Joseph Kosinski

I've always said that the artist dies twice. And the first death is the hardest which is the career death, the creative death. The physical death is an inevitability. — Sylvester Stallone

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

There's nothing more creative I'll ever do in my career than trying to make an hour of TV everyday. — James Corden

I never considered writing as a career - it was always a creative outlet for me and something I just loved to do. — Doreen Cronin

So much of an artist's career hinges on the sense that we are going somewhere, that we are not just trapped by the four walls of wherever we are. For creative sanity, I must believe that if I just do the next right thing, a path will unfold for me. — Julia Cameron

I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity. — David Wroblewski

It's good you have something to keep you occupied." I smile stiffly and turn away from her. Because I'm this far from asking what the fuck she thinks I do all day. But even through the surge of anger that's rising, I remind myself of what I know is true: she means well. They all do. These women want me to receive all of God's blessings, many of which can be bestowed only after my temple marriage, which should be my first objective. Everything I've done so far (my two graduate degrees, my international travels, my teaching career, my friendships, my creative pursuits), is "preparing." Treading water, keeping time, staying busy until real life begins. — Nicole Hardy

When I figured that I could do anything if I was simply methodical about it. I went to the library - and this was before the Internet - and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects. — Jamie Hyneman

Pick a profession that will give you enough money to give you economic freedom. It is nice to pick a career that really taxes your mind. Use your mind in new and creative ways. You will find that your mind will develop and become stronger. — Frederick Lenz

For me to do a project - I have a pretty successful solo career, so - for me to even want to do Primus, it had to be a creative step forward. — Les Claypool

In my career, fun becomes a big factor. If something feels like it's going to be creative and be fun - follow your bliss. Is this where the juice is? Then I go there. — Kenny Loggins

I've always looked at directing as the next step for me in my creative career, and after spending the better part of the last decade on a television set absorbing as much as I could from in front of the camera, I'm now eager to learn as much as I can from behind it. — Ian Anthony Dale

He loved his job. What was advertising, anyway, but a knowledge of people and of which buttons to push to nudge them into opening their wallets?

It was, he often though, an accepted, creative, even expected twist on picking those wallets. For a man who had spent the first half of his life as a thief, it was the perfect career. — Nora Roberts

So many dancers paint. I used to paint. I started again recently. While I was dancing, I was very busy with my career. Start something else that makes use of your creative ability because if you don't you will die inside as a person. — Katherine Dunham

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls
woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Magic Johnson was in the seventh year of his Hall of Fame career when thoughts of his basketball afterlife led him to the office of uber-executive Michael Ovitz, co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful agency. — Don Yaeger

The higher our self-esteem, the more likely we are to be creative in our work, which means the more successful we are likely to be. The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life - emotionally, creatively and spiritually. — Nathaniel Branden

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

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

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible. — Peter Jackson

If you work hard and you learn and you absorb and you pay attention, career in food is great. This job can take you all around the world. You can eat the most delicious food. It allows you to be creative ... [And] don't ever quit. It's going to pay off eventually. It might not be in a year. Might be 20 years or 10 years. But you have to keep pushing. Just have that fire, have the passion, and want to be successful. And don't listen to anybody else. — April Bloomfield

One of the things that's been nice about my career is that I've been able to do so many different things, and variety keeps your creative soul fulfilled. I'm constantly looking to find new things to do. It's just project to project for me. You never know where the next thing's going to come from. — Drew Goddard

God flourished my ministry and my career of creative thinking, communicating and writing back 50 years. — Robert H. Schuller

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings ... pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is! — Bill Bonner