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"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."
"But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history -- that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires."
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal that you can gather votes like box tops is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right."
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"If you ever desire to give birth to anything at all, then you cannot do without solitude."
"Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it."
"Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach."
Explore more quotes by David Mitchell
"In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction."
"This isn't lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator."
"Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better."
"Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion. My fifth Declaration posits how, in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights, the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."
"Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous."
"I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans."
"Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth " I rap my knuckles on the table " "you'll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue."
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