Creativity

When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky), Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1918).

Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Properly practiced creativity MUST result in greater sales more economically achieved. Properly practiced creativity can lift your claims out of the swamp of sameness and make them accepted, believed, persuasive, urgent.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said ... (1989).

Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804).

[H]e who pretends to be either painter or engraver without being a master of drawing is an imposter.
~ William Blake, in The Life of William Blake (1863), Volume II. Prose Writings. Public Address

I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.
I will not Reason and Compare; my business is to Create.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804).

Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, no can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.
~ William Blake, from The Rossetti Manuscript (c. 1793-1811). Public Address, intended to accompany the engraving of the Canterbury Pilgrims (c.1810)

No form we make is a form we can live in long.
~ William Bronk, Living Instead (1991). Formal Declaration

Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, "You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass." Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.
~ Bill Bryson, Notes From A Small Island (1995).

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Creative Observer (1992). Painting and Guns

We are not setting out to explore static pre-existing data. We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine (1985). On Coincidence

We can create a land of dreams.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands (1987).

An Imprese (as the Italians call it) is a devise in picture with his Motte, or Word, borne by noble and learned personages, to notifie some particular conceit of their owne.
~ William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605).

That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there -- that, we may say, is created.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, from Willa Cather On Writing (1949). The Novel Démeublé (first published in The New Republic, 30; 12 April 1922)

I would rather see words out on their own, away
from their families and the warehouse of Roget
wandering the world where they sometimes fall
in love with a completely different word.
~ Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning (1995). Thesaurus

Invention flags, his brain goes muddy,
And black despair succeeds brown study.
~ William Congreve, An Impossible Thing (1720).

The best cure for a sluggish mind is to disturb its routine.
~ William H. Danforth

Creativity is something new brought into existence by someone with a special power to conceive, or describe, or reveal.
~ (William) Robertson Davies, in The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books (1997). Chapter 19. A View in Winter: Creativity in Old Age

[I]t is only when fear is cast out that the full creative energies are unleashed.
~ William Orville Douglas, Of Men and Mountains (1950).

Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ William James "Will" Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume III (1944). Caesar and Christ

Technique is of less interest than character and story.
~ William Friedkin, The Harold Lloyd Master Seminar Series at the American Film Institute (16 March 1994).

My staff and contributors create the magazine. ... What I create is the atmosphere.
~ William M. "Bill" Gaines, quoted in The Mad World of William M. Gaines (1972).

Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
~ John William Gardner

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
~ John William Gardner

The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be (which means, of course, that he has achieved a certain measure of detachment from what is).
~ John William Gardner, Self-Renewal (1963).

I like the fact that if people really try they can figure out how to invent things that actually have an impact.
~ Bill Gates

In creativity the fit is "doing", and it burns itself out; its end is exhaustion.
~ William Gibson, A Season in Heaven; Being The Log Of An Expedition After That Legendary Beast, Cosmic Consciousness (1974).

The new thing appears from a point in the area of his awareness, from a position without magnitude, which is of course quite impossible. Yet this is the occasional operation of creativity.
~ William Golding, A Moving Target (1982). Belief and Creativity (Lecture in Hamburg, Germany; 11 April 1980).

Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.
~ William Goldman

To create is ... to cause, not with nothing, but with the very essence of our being -- with our force, our will, our personality.
~ Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, from Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform (1852).

You can read a lot into it. ... You can compare Fred and Barney Rubble with Gleason and Carney.
~ William Denby Hanna (of "The Flintstones" being a parody of "The Honeymooners"), quoted in The Associated Press (22 March 2001). Cartoon Pioneer Hanna Dead at 90

Architecture paves the way, as it were, for the adequate realization of the God, toiling and wrestling in his service with external nature, and seeking to extricate it from the chaos of finitude, and the abortiveness of chance.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel, The Philosophy of Art.

From individual minds are born all great discoveries and revolutions of thought. New ideas may be in the air and more or less present in many minds, but it is always an individual who at the last takes the creative step and enriches mankind with the living germ-thought of a new era of opinion.
~ Sir William Huggins, Presidential Address, Royal Society of London Anniversary Meeting (30 November 1905).

Originality, I fear, is too often only undetected and frequently unconscious plagiarism.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, quoted in the Wit and Wisdom of Dean Inge (1927).

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism. This is probably itself a plagiarism, but I cannot remember who said it before me.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, Labels & Libels (1929).

For me the creative process, first of all, requires a good nine hours of sleep at night. Second, it must not be pushed by the need to produce practical applications.
~ William N. Lipscomb, Jr.

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 the hill.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, from Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948).

One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and interesting ways.
~ Peter McWilliams, You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought (1995).

That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense, I may tell you that flat. There is no such thing: it's a mere matter of craftsmanship.
~ William Morris, in The Life of William Morris, Volume I (1899). Chapter VI: The Earthly Paradise, 1865-1870

A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.
~ Bill Moyers, in The New York Times (3 January 1982).

It [creativity] sometimes means piercing the mundane to find the marvelous or looking beyond the marvelous to find the mundane.
~ Bill Moyers

Everyone who enjoys thinks that the principal thing to the tree is the fruit, but in point of fact the principal thing to it is the seed. -- Herein lies the difference between them that create and them that enjoy.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. First Sequel: Mixed Opinions and Maxims (March 1879).

It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts or things or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new forms -- the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.
~ William Charles Franklyn Plomer, in Electric Delights (1978).

God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man.
~ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Act I, scene ii

An authentic life is not something we pursue, it's something that must be created out of the passion and values that matter to us each and every day.
~ William E. ("Bill") Strickland, Jr., Make the Impossible Possible: One Man's Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary (2007). Chapter Five: The Secret to Success

If someone wants to be a cartoonist, let's see him develop his own strip instead of taking over the duties of someone else's. We've got too many comic strip corpses being propped up and passed for living by new cartoonists who ought to be doing something of their own. If a cartoonist isn't good enough to make it on his own work, he has no business being in the newspaper.
~ Bill Watterson, Speech at the Festival of Cartoon Art, Ohio State University (27 October 1989). The Cheapening of Comics

[H]uman beings have enormous resources of creativity that permit them to devise their own social inventions, without waiting for an outsider to intervene and invent what the community or organization needs.
~ William Foote Whyte, ASR Presidential Address, published in the American Sociological Review, Vol. 47, No. 1 (February 1982). Social Inventions for Solving Human Problems

Though desolate
The way may seem, command thy fate.
Send forth thy thought -
Create--CREATE!
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from New Thought Pastels (1906). The Law

People copy, people steal. Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with special effects. I couldn't do that. I quit smoking because I couldn't reload my Zippo ...
~ Billy Wilder, in The New York Times

The evolutionary process works with whatever it's got. There are no fresh starts; it doesn't design anything new, it just tinkers with what's already there. It may be that what's already there plays some essential role in life, and the life of the organism may turn out incidentally to be useful for something else. If that's important, then it may be subject to modification for that role in addition to its original one.
~ George C. Williams, quoted in The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995).

Teaching creativity to your child isn't like teaching good manners. No one can paint a masterpiece by bowing to another person's precepts about elbows on the table.
~ Gurney Williams III, in Working Mother (August 1987). Creativity Is It A Gift from the Gods or Can We Teach It To Our Children

As we become purer channels for God's light, we develop an appetite for the sweetness that is possible in this world. A miracle worker is not geared toward fighting the world that is, but toward creating the world that could be.
~ Marianne Williamson

The man makes the shape, and the shape remakes the man ...
~ Raymond Henry Williams, The Long Revolution (1961). The Creative Mind

[W]hen you have a great audience, you can just keep going and finding new things.
~ Robin Williams, Tribune Media Services (14 July 2002). Williams returns to live comedy for HBO

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams

Isn't egomania always the precondition of all creative work? I have found little to dispel that notion.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, from Tennessee Williams Memoirs (1975).

Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1948). Book 2, Sunday in the Park

Unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness.
~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1948). Book 2, Sunday in the Park

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
~ William Butler Yeats, from In The Seven Woods (1904). Adam's Curse

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
~ William Butler Yeats