Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.

They pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

... what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction... Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities.