Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
Only the mind that has emptied itself of the known is creative. That is creation. What it creates has nothing to do with it. Freedom from the known is the state of a mind that is in creation.
When I took the job as Estée Lauder's creative director, the first thing I did was go into the archives! I love taking our heritage and making it modern.
The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
The power of imagination is the ultimate creative power.. no doubt about that. While knowledge defines all we currently know and understand.. imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions
Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.
Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.
Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
The creative scientist studies nature with the rapt gaze of the lover, and is guided as often by aesthetics as by rational considerations in guessing how nature works.