The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “creativity”

E.B. White on Creativity and the Two Sides of Discipline
E.B. White on Creativity and the Two Sides of Discipline

How to ride the “wave of emotion” in creative work on a raft of conscientious revision.

read article

Mozart on Creativity and the Ideation Process
Mozart on Creativity and the Ideation Process

“It is quite natural that people who really have something particular about them should be different from each other on the outside as well as on the inside.”

read article

The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity: Stephen Jay Gould on What Nabokov’s Butterfly Studies Reveal About the Unity of Creativity
The Paradox of Intellectual Promiscuity: Stephen Jay Gould on What Nabokov’s Butterfly Studies Reveal About the Unity of Creativity

“There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.”

read article

Madeleine L’Engle on Creativity, Hope, Getting Unstuck, and How Studying Science Enriches Art
Madeleine L’Engle on Creativity, Hope, Getting Unstuck, and How Studying Science Enriches Art

“Terrible things happen. And those are the things that we learn from… The amazing thing is that despite all… the human spirit still manages to survive, to stay strong.”

read article

The Knot in the Rosary: Rilke on How Difficulty Can Fuel Creativity and Why Feedback Poisons Art
The Knot in the Rosary: Rilke on How Difficulty Can Fuel Creativity and Why Feedback Poisons Art

“All art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.”

read article

Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor
Roald Dahl on How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor

“I doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.”

read article

How Ursula Nordstrom, the Greatest Patron Saint of Modern Childhood Stood, Up for Creativity Against Commercial Cowardice
How Ursula Nordstrom, the Greatest Patron Saint of Modern Childhood Stood, Up for Creativity Against Commercial Cowardice

“Oh hell, it just boils down to: you just can’t explain this sort of basic wonderful stuff to some adults.”

read article

Some of Today’s Most Prominent Artists on Courage, Creativity, Criticism, Success, and What It Means to Be a Great Artist
Some of Today’s Most Prominent Artists on Courage, Creativity, Criticism, Success, and What It Means to Be a Great Artist

Wisdom from Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramović, Damien Hirst, Laurie Simmons, Carroll Dunham, and more.

read article

Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing, and the Nature of Creativity
Pearl S. Buck, the Youngest Woman to Receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on Art, Writing, and the Nature of Creativity

“The creative instinct is … an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual… — an energy which no single life can consume.”

read article

In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity
In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity

How the American obsession with happiness at the expense of sadness robs us of the capacity for a full life.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)