When I teach, I like to begin each class with an opening reading.
Here are some quotations that I have collected recently for this purpose.

"Anyone can make the simple complicated.
Creativity is making the complicated simple."
CHARLES MINGUS

"I have nothing to offer until someone actually figures out a way to lay something in front of me to solve. And I would say that most of the inspiration I would take from a design project, maybe 75% of it, will come from the circumstances surrounding the project. Who the client is, who the audience is... I spend a lot of time trying to completely understand what the context of the challenge is. And when I feel like I've come up with something that's worthwhile, I almost consistently feel that it's not something intuitive of me or is related to some painting I've seen that's cool, or whatever, but instead it's something that I've pulled right out of the circumstances."
MICHAEL BIERUT

"I think there's a lot of risk associated with the learning process. I think teaching is a big risk. Everyday... just being in design: the daily practice of creativity is all about taking risks. Trying to be spontaneous. Do something that you really have no clue if it's going to be successful or not."
STEVE HARTMAN

"Inspiration really comes from some level of analysis, and definitely an intuitive understanding. It doesn't come necessarily from what something looks like. It has to do with the meaning behind the image."
DEBORAH SUSSMAN

"Sometimes a vacation is good. Go off somewhere or work on another project, because the flash will come. Each person has to find his own way of being objective, distant enough to see clearly, like you are seeing the work for the first time."
PRIMO ANGELI

"I think it helps to have an extremely broad range of interests. You know, the best fashion designers start out as painters, the best filmmakers are graphic designers - you know, that sort of cross-discipline. And if you can bring a little bit of that in, I think that's what shines through. You get a slightly lateral approach to things."
CLIVE PIERCY

"An advocacy poster is the manifestation of a charged social or political idea designed to inform and illuminate, stimulate and inspire, agitate and attack. When finely honed, it communicates without ambiguity. When smartly conceived, it imparts meaning through complexity and simplification. When on target - when message and image, form and function are one - it shoots a charge into the brain that pierces the conscious and subconscious triggering action, now or later."
STEVEN HELLER

"I have always believed that a good designer should be able to express complicated and profound meanings in a simple way and a good poster should make people think."
FANG CHEN