1. “In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.”

Rick Rubin wrote this in The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023), the book he produced with the writer Neil Strauss for Penguin Press. Rubin is the producer and Def Jam co-founder behind the Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash’s late-career American Recordings comeback, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the book reads less like a memoir than a set of meditations on attention. His ordering is deliberate: inspiration first, the maker second, the audience third. He is not being indifferent, and he has been careful to say so — “the audience comes last in service to the audience,” he told CBC’s Q. The logic is that if you design for the crowd before the work exists, you can only ever make something that already exists. Make the thing you would want to make, he argues, and the audience may follow. Cater to it first, and it never arrives.

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023)

2. “I apprenticed myself to beginners. I was the studio assistant now, and things went smoothly as long as I knew my place.”

Austin Kleon published Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again on June 2, 2026 — his first book in seven years, and a national bestseller. The “beginners” in the line are his two young sons, whom he served as a kind of studio assistant: fetching art supplies, fixing snacks, and staying out of the way. Kleon is the writer-illustrator behind Steal Like an Artist (2012), whose books have sold nearly two million copies and been translated into thirty languages. The joke inside the quote is that the apprenticeship reversed. He expected to teach his children; instead he learned to work the way they did — without fear, without hesitation, and without worrying whether the result was any good. The most useful creative teacher, he suggests, may be the person who has not yet learned to be afraid.

— Austin Kleon, Don’t Call It Art (2026)

3. “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

John Cleese delivered this line in a 1991 lecture called “Creativity in Management,” given to the training company Video Arts at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. The Monty Python co-founder — born in 1939 — built the talk around the research of the psychologist Donald MacKinnon, who found that the people their peers rated as most creative did not differ in intelligence from their less creative colleagues. What they had, Cleese said, was a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood: a “way of operating” rather than an ability you either have or don’t. He went on to describe the two modes we move between — the open, playful mode in which ideas form, and the closed, purposeful mode in which they get executed — and argued that creativity is largely a matter of learning to switch between them on purpose.

— John Cleese, “Creativity in Management” lecture (1991)

4. “Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.”

Twyla Tharp made this the thesis of The Creative Habit (2003), the book she wrote with Mark Reiter after more than three decades of choreography. Tharp, born in 1941, has created more than 130 dances and won a Tony Award for the Broadway musical Movin’ Out, as well as two Emmy Awards for the television production Baryshnikov by Tharp. Her book opens by naming the old Romantic debate — is creativity a kiss from God on the brow, or is it hard work? — and answers without hesitation: hard work. She is blunt that no one is born with skill; it is developed through exercise, repetition, and the willingness to begin badly. The quote is a promise rather than a scold. If creativity is a habit, it is something you can build, and the people who look most gifted are often simply the ones who kept showing up long enough for the habit to take.

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (2003)

5. “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

Steven Pressfield wrote The War of Art in 2002 after a long apprenticeship of his own — by his own account he wrote for seventeen years before he earned his first penny, a $3,500 option on a screenplay that was never produced. The book has since sold more than half a million copies and given the language a useful word for the thing that stops us: Resistance. Pressfield’s claim is not that talent doesn’t matter, but that it is largely out of our hands. We cannot control the level of gift we were given, he writes; we can control how hard and how smart we work. The professional, in his telling, is not the person who feels no fear but the person who sits down anyway. The quote is the whole book in two sentences: stop waiting to feel ready, and do the work in front of you today.

— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (2002)

6. “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar in 1986 with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter, made this the organizing principle of Creativity, Inc. (2014). He first worked out the argument in a 2008 Harvard Business Review article, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” where he described lunching with a studio head who insisted his problem was finding good ideas rather than good people — a view Catmull considered exactly backwards. Pixar’s evidence was in its own filmography: Toy Story, released in 1995, was not the product of one perfect idea but of a strong team reworking a flawed one across years of production. The lesson inverts the way most of us think about creative work. Ideas are cheap and plentiful; what is rare and precious is a group of people with the candor and the skill to take an ordinary idea and make it extraordinary.

— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc. (2014)

7. “The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015), the follow-up to her memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The image carries the book’s central idea: creativity is not a rare mineral issued to a chosen few but treasure already buried in everyone, waiting to be dug up. Gilbert calls the digging “creative living,” and she defines it broadly — not a life professionally devoted to the arts, but any life driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear. The book is organized around the qualities that make that hunt possible: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust, and divinity. The quote is generous precisely because it refuses to sort people into the creative and the uncreative. If the jewels are already in you, the only question left is whether you will go looking.

— Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic (2015)

8. “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”

David Lynch wrote this in Catching the Big Fish (2006), a short book about meditation, consciousness, and creativity. Lynch — the filmmaker behind Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks, who died on January 16, 2025, at 78 — began practising Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and credited it with the depth his best ideas came from. His metaphor is simple and demanding at once: surface thinking yields surface ideas, and the large ones live further down. In the same passage he notes that down deep the fish are “more powerful and more pure,” and that everything comes up from that level. The instruction is not to wait for inspiration but to dive — to build the daily practice that puts you where the good ideas swim.

— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish (2006)

Create your own quote graphics

These quotes are meant to be shared. A well-designed quote graphic can stop a scroll, start a conversation, and inspire someone at the right moment. Whether you are posting on Instagram, creating Pinterest pins, or designing WhatsApp statuses, Quotes Creator gives you ready-made templates, beautiful fonts, and custom gradients to bring any of these quotes to life in minutes.

Designing quote graphics for “Creativity”

• ✓ Use bold indigo and violet gradients — they suggest imagination and depth without tipping into novelty
• ✓ Pair a modern geometric font for the author line with an italic serif for the quote itself
• ✓ Keep the text to 2–3 lines maximum so the sentence lands in a single glance on a phone
• ✓ Leave generous space around the words — quotes about making work best when they breathe
• ✓ Export square for Instagram and landscape for X or link previews