Fmr. President Musée Picasso
President Centre Pompidou
Picasso is a symbol of the creative process.
Always in metamorphosis. Always in transformation. Sometimes when you become wealthy and famous, you stop having the energy of the creative process, but if you see the whole span of his career, you have 50,000 works of art in all mediums. So the main mission of the museum is to display like a kaleidoscope, and we have always a new angle, a new direction.
Chief Engineer & Co-founder of Marine BioEnergy
Grows Kelp in the Ocean to Provide Carbon-neutral Fuels
The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for thousands and millions of people, phenomenal sacrifices that people make. When you see what some people do and the risks they take. I have basically found my job for the remaining years that I have on the earth to try to make the world a better place.
Psychologist, Neuroanthropologist & Cognitive Neuroscientist
Author of Origins of the Modern Mind, & A Mind So Rare
Lots of people have written books both optimistic and pessimistic about the Internet. It's a wonderful thing, it gives an opportunity to broaden our experience. I think in many ways the Internet is the only hope if you want to eliminate racism and want to raise the bar across the world, but at the same time, the inequalities are completely ridiculous. They've reached a point of insanity, and we have a moral issue. Is one person ever worth twice as much as another person? Can you justify one human being owning 10 times as much as another person? I don't think you can. I don't think that the president of the biggest cooperation in the world is worth 10 times the poorest person in the world, but that's not what we have. Sometimes he may be “worth” a million times more, a hundred thousand times more. That’s crazy.
Author of Living Queer History · Assoc. Professor of History, Roanoke College
Co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project
One of the things I really tried to get across in Living Queer History, and particularly in my chapter called “The Whiteness of Queerness” is to first make clear that LGBTQ histories have long been informed by white supremacy. It's kind of the unspoken thing that people don't want to talk about. It’s true all over the country. And so what I’ve started to think about is that often LGBTQ spaces are just unthinkingly white because there's a racial blindness, a racial myopia where folks are not thinking about the fact of how racial dominance is playing into that space. Or how racial dominance is playing into the way we tell stories about LGBTQ belonging.
Writer, Activist, Comparative Literature Professor
Author of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back
To explore different worlds. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thing I think great teachers do is to embody what they talk about, the values that they profess, the things they feel are important in their everyday lives outside of the literature. So when I become involved in politics or a cause, it’s a reflection of what I've learned through any number of things including literature. Literature doesn’t stand alone. Literature is part of the world.
Author of NYTimes bestseller All of the Marvels, Eisner Award–winning Reading Comics
Host of the Voice of Latveria podcast
I like the idea that your actions in the world can be motivated by both idealism and realism about how to achieve those ideals. I like the idea that morality is not simple. There is this idea that there are the heroes and there's the villains and you can easily tell who's who, and that's not so true as it used to be in comics and that's meaningful. One thing that is interesting about the Marvel story is there’s basically nobody who's just a bad guy to be a bad guy. Everyone has their reasons. Almost everyone is capable of redemption in some way, even the worst of the worst are capable of tremendous heroism and tremendous idealism and genuinely wanting to heal the world make it a better place.
We're all part of a web like a dreamcatcher. Everybody knows a dreamcatcher and whatever you do that’s wrong will eventually come back and affect you because we’re all connected.
Producers of the Award-Winning Mass starring Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs & Martha Plimpton
“Usually we just see the soundbites and the news and then there's a new one or a new story, the politics that takes away from what these families are going. These people in these towns are just glossed over, looked over. And that's not the case in real life. They live with this trauma forever…What I hope the next generation takes is just to absorb everything from our generation and our parents’ generation. There are a lot of living generations right now. The longevity of people and the young families, it’s amazing. I had five generations of my family alive at one point in my life, and it was just the most amazing thing I've ever been a part of.” –JP Ouellette
Scientist Emeritus & Fmr. Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
& the National Toxicology Program
There are thousands of chemicals in our water, just like there are in air, just like there are in food. We sometimes compartmentalize too much. We forget, but what is food? Food is made up of chemicals. And I think we need to be broader in our understanding because, for example, we all have on us and within us our Microbiomes and we think about the GI bacteria and we now know that if people are obese they have very different microbial content in their gut compared to people who are not obese. And we know that a baby born by C-section section has a different position than a baby born vaginally. And we know that these things have impacts. We know that many of the bacteria have the ability for example to metabolize the contaminants as well as things in our food. And we know that you can have a different response depending upon what people are eating.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament
I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.
Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian
It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.
Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International
Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist
There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.
Photographer & Videographer
Winner of the World Press Photo 6*6 Global talent in Africa 2020
I’m not just taking beautiful pictures. I’m collecting their voices, collecting their movement, collecting different aspects, and preserving this moment because they will not always be here. I don’t just see myself as a photographer, an artist. I also see myself as an archiver. Someone who is archiving as a researcher.
35th Generation of Shaolin Masters
Headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe
Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all, it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentences, in the beginning, is: With your thoughts, you are creating the world…So it’s very rarely clearly stated that it is the thoughts that are creating the world. Nevertheless, if you are now looking at the practices that the Shaolin Temple offers, that is quite physical. There is a lot of physicality in there, so you might think but why are you saying with thoughts you create the world, but you have so many different physical activities. It is because if you want to have mental freedom. If you want to approach freedom, you cannot just approach freedom by doing things or trying to chase freedom. The freedom that we are looking for is the type of freedom that is derived and that is very closely related to its counterpart, which is very hard restriction or very hard structure. So if you want to experience what freedom is, look at the restrictions of your life.
Artist in Light, Sculpture & Sound
Nature is my home because. It doesn't matter where I am. It’s available and it's there and it's always giving me the same sort of nourishment. All of us have had to develop a sense of home elsewhere. With me in particular, I've been traveling and living in different countries for the last 20 years since I was 22, so it's not even that I've had a geographical place that is my new home because I've moved around every four years. I'm in a new place a new community and new friends, so nature is my home.
Picower Professor of Neuroscience
MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory & Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
There are a lot of distractions in cities. So it's always good to maybe take some time out, be in a quieter place with no distractions so you can let your thoughts run. And that leads into the creative process because new ideas, new thoughts and where they come from. They come from following the garden path of associations in your mind. One thought leads to another, leads to another until your mind is in a new place it's never been before. Or you put two thoughts together that were never together before, but now they are because you managed to somehow follow this garden path of thoughts from one thought to the other. That's where creativity comes from, that's where your ideas come from, seeing things in a new way, seeing things that were never together before. And if you have constant distractions that interferes with that process.
Director of Kotter International · Co-author of Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard to Imagine Results in Uncertain & Volatile Times
How do you get people to have a sense of urgency to actually take action and do something different? What we're finding is the learnings from business very much do apply to other spheres and also more generally to challenges like climate change. We’re facing the question of how do you get more people to actually be willing to take real meaningful action.
Carbon Ruins · Climate Futures · Climaginaries · Earth Systems Governance Project
Our starting point was that a lot of the stories we tell about future worlds are quite poor. It’s not stories that are meeting the world as it is now. It’s difficult for people to inhabit the kinds of worlds that we imagine through scenarios or modelling, so there is a kind of distance between where we are now and the life worlds of a decarbonized or a post-fossil world.
CEO of Global Witness
As an organization, Global Witness has to take security risks extremely seriously. We encounter quite a range of threats to our work and some of those take the form of cyberattacks, we’re regularly threatened with lawsuits by powerful companies and individuals who don’t like the scrutiny we place them under, but far and away the most serious category of threats is to those we work with in fragile and sometimes dangerous parts of the world.
Entrepreneur, Public Speaker & NYTimes Bestselling Author
Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World · Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink
On average in advanced societies, about 70% of freshwater that’s consumed is consumed by agriculture. In less developed countries, sometimes as high as 95% of the freshwater goes to agriculture, which means that you’re depleting the amount of water available for the environment. You’re depleting amount of groundwater to preserve for the future, especially in dry times, and it creates a stress for the future…What are you going to do when you have hundreds of millions of water refugees coming from places where there used to be enough water where there’s now just not enough water? What is the world going to do then?
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
