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"So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."
"My pond life with hydra is over, now I'm into the ocean world of poetry to dive deeper.."
"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."
"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."
"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."
"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."
"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."
"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."
Explore more quotes by Graham Greene
"It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."
"He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?"
"He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one's hands altogether by death."
"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."
"Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing."
"A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street."
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