45 Top Quotes About Creativity For When You Need a Little Inspiration

Are you looking for quotes about creativity?

Tools are nice, but we all need a little inspiration sometimes.

When you’re stuck or feeling creatively drained, the best place to look is often in the writings of creative people you admire.

I’ve gathered 45 top creativity quotes that inspire me and other writers and you can find them below.

Maya Angelou

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

Arthur Ashe

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

Saul Bellow

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

Paulo Coelho

“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”

Anthony J. D’Angelo

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.”

Emily Dickinson

“I dwell in possibility.”

Albert Einstein

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.”

Henry Ford

“A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.”

Robert Frost

“The best way out is always through.”

Napoleon Hill

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”

Steve Jobs

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

Tom Wolfe

“Put your good where it will do the most.”

Oscar Wilde

“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”

David Foster Wallace

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

Mark Twain

“There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”

John Steinbeck

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

Gertrude Stein

“One must dare to be happy. “

Aaron Sorkin

“The world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

George Saunders

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”

Anna Quindlen

“You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

Pablo Picasso

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

Anais Nin

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Charles Mingus

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

John Maynard Keynes

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

Pablo Picasso − Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form: Graphic Works, 1895-1972

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ”

Sylvia Plath − The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Derek Landy − Skulduggery Pleasant

“Doors are for people with no imagination.”

Jacob Bronowski − The Ascent of Man

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”

John Steinbeck − East of Eden

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”

Austin Kleon − Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”

Madeleine L’Engle − Walking on Water

“But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.”

Ray Bradbury − Zen in the Art of Writing

“That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

Deepak Chopra − Life After Death: The Burden of Proof

“What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.”

Chuck Palahniuk − Lullaby

“Anymore, no one’s mind is their own.”

Freeman Dyson − Infinite in All Directions

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”

G.K. Chesterton − The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”

Julio Cortázar − Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”

Jim Butcher − Blood Rites

“I’ve always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.”

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam − Indomitable Spirit

“When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.”

Arthur Koestler − Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967

“Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”

Scarlett Thomas − PopCo

“Routine kills creative thought.”

Charles Baudelaire − The Painter Of Modern Life And Other Essays

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry − Night Flight

“If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!”

Haruki Murakami − Kafka on the Shore

“Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”

Inspired Yet?

When I find a great creativity quote, I sometimes use it as a writing prompt to overcome problem’s like writer’s block. I write the quote at the top of the page and then spend a little time freewriting about what the creativity quote means to me.

Then when I’m done, I remove the quote and keep what I’ve written.

I also keep a file of quotes about creativity in my computer that I draw upon when I’m looking for something special to sprinkle over a piece of writing.

If you enjoyed these quotes about creativity, please share this post with a friend. What are your favourite quotes about creativity? Let me know below.