Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources. Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it.

Truly creative people work for work’s own sake, and if they make a public discovery or become famous that is a bonus.

I believe creative work needs communication. So it’s extremely encouraging to be with a group of people who form a community and to know that you’re not isolated, although as individuals we must always work in an inner silence.

The problem is, some of us have either convinced ourselves that we are not creative, or are yet to find our way. Confidence in our own creativity can wane. Which is bad. Confidence is crucial. In my experience artists, like a lot of us, fear being “found out.” But somehow they manage to summon up enough self-belief to overcome the self-doubt, which enables them to back their creativity. The Beatles were just a bunch of young lads with time on their hands who found the confidence to persuade themselves and then the world that they were musicians.

Creativity makes life valuable. Man is the sole creator; he stands out from the swarming masses of petty little folks. It doesn't matter what kind of creativity it is - whether scientific or socio-political - it's of equal value.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.

For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

Creativity, no matter how elementally miniscule or broad in scope, is what differentiates human beings as superior to any material value, and also empowers the achievement of excellence beyond personal flaws.

In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. "Creativity" to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

a reminder that you don't need to make a ton of money fast to keep doing creative work

you can enjoy creative work for itself, you can do it with others, you can be ambitious in generous ways

don't let strongly worded content hack your sense of what you are called to do