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Creativity Quotes


"Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination."


"If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope."


"I don't think with any book you get used to people falling in love with the story. It's been incredible just to realize your books are being read. It's a pretty amazing feeling."


"I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script."


"The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years."


"Free verse is like free love, it is a contradiction in terms."


"That's easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film."


"In real life I do violence, but for psychic stuff I do other things better."


"Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees."


"This call for a new culture is not a new idea."


"The emotions must be called upon to give feeling to the thought so it will take form."


"But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is."


"I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters."


"There's no good idea that can't be improved on."



"Minimalism wasn't a real idea - it ended before it started."


"We as Republicans understand that we have got to protect these... entitlement programs - these entitlement programs for our seniors today. And we have to sit down and have a discussion. We need more ideas on the table."


"The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good."


"It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another."


"From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me."



"It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again."


"My rejection of the idea of entertainment in its current form is based on the audience that comes with it."


"Land began to be seen as something to be owned privately and exploited for private interests, and never was entirely reconciled with the old ideas that land should be utilized in common for the good of all."


"In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that."


"Create lightning bolt ideas during brainstorms by causing disturbances in your atmosphere."


"Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression."



"You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish."


"Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver."


"Hold it. You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see the three bears eat the three little pigs, and then the bears join up with the big bad wolf and eat Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood! Tell me a story like that, OK?"


"Talent is that which is in a man's power genius is that in whose power a man is."


"When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)"then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly"why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."


"What I feel bad about is not having published very much in the last few years."


"We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden."



"To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity."


"Finally, I want to make the point that we are Republicans. We are the majority. It is going to be a little more difficult because we have to govern and come up with ideas."


"Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes."


"Art should be for sale. The artist should not."


"I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances."


"The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things."


"I believe there are so many other disciplines and themes that we still haven't explored yet. It's infinite what we can apply our creativity to."


"She held out a small voice recorder. 'By the way, could you describe exactly how you felt at the moment of impact? I'm writing this short story--'Put that away, Hazel,' hissed Mam. 'The poor boy is in pain.'Hazel persisted. 'Would that be a white-hot pain? Or more of a dull throbbing pain?"


"A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention."


"I cannot tell you how important fresh, crisp writing is for an aspiring writer. Plot is great. The overall concept is super important. But the writing is what sells your work. It all boils down to the words you choose and the order in which you arrange them."


"I want to do something splendid. Something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead I think I shall write books."


"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube."


"Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king."



"One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space."
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