But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Interpretation
Money and machines alone cannot foster true creativity; they may facilitate processes but do not inspire transformation.
In this quote, Lewis Hyde emphasizes the idea that genuine creativity comes from within the individual rather than from external factors such as money or technology. He suggests that relying heavily on these externalities can disconnect individuals from their innate creative abilities, urging a reevaluation of what drives human innovation and cultural development.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one might use this quote to highlight the value of internal creativity over technological reliance.
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.
Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.
That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value
I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.
We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it's creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.
Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.
It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
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