Creativity Quote by Dick Bruna

There is a quiet insurgency packed into that clean, almost apologetic sentence. Bruna frames his artistic calling not as some lightning-bolt revelation but as an “idea” that has to be held up against family gravity: business as default, art as deviation. The line’s power comes from how modestly it admits the stakes. He doesn’t say he rebelled, or escaped, or refused. He “comes from” business people, and then, softly, he “wanted” something else. That restraint is the subtext: in a culture where commercial sense is treated as inheritance, art can feel like an elective risk, even when it becomes a life’s work.

The context matters. Bruna wasn’t an outsider with nothing to lose; he was born into a publishing family and was expected to enter the trade. That background makes the quote more than a romantic artist-myth. It’s a portrait of someone negotiating proximity to commerce, not pretending to be pure of it. Bruna’s later work (most famously Miffy) is deceptively simple, engineered with the clarity of design and the discipline of print. You can hear the business-world influence in the economy of the phrasing: no drama, no manifesto, just a decision.

The intent, then, is both autobiographical and instructive. Creativity isn’t presented as a mystical identity; it’s a choice articulated against an expected path, and it’s precisely that understatement that makes it believable.