Quotes & Sayings About Creativity And Madness

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. — Peter S. Beagle

I have never seen genius without a touch of madness ... and vice versa. — Lance Conrad

Fools write books about madness being an elevated mental state or an alternative form of creativity. It's not, it's anguish. — Jonathan Kellerman

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way - then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering. — Nick Flynn

Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low? — Megan Hart

I'm a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There's no middle ground, only madness and sadness. — Fennel Hudson

One of the tutors let it slip when we were talking about the difference between revelation, inspiration, creativity and madness. How can we know which is which? — James Runcie

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration. — Arthur Holitscher

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. — Jeanette Winterson

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.
from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius — Aberjhani

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins. — Kamal Ravikant

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely. — Friedrich Schiller

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness. — Peter J. Carroll

Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in. — Barbara Januszkiewicz

Last night, I was a mad man searching for a whiff of your fragrance. The stars and the moon even laughed at me. — Avijeet Das

To be creative is to look Madness in the eye and challenge it to a spitting contest. — River Fairchild

I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams. — Anne Lamott

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls. — Aberjhani