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Creativity Quotes
"The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow."
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"I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them."
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"Sing your life, any fool can think of words that rhyme."
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"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."
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"A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same."
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"We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors - walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful."
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"Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved in the broth."
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"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."
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"It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books."
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"I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church."
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"The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher."
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"Thousands of mercenaries, who have trained in camps on the territory of Chechnya as well as come in from abroad, are actually preparing to impose extremist ideas on the whole world."
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"When you act against gravity, you break your body. When you act against Love, you break your heart."
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"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."
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"Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair."
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"Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter."
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"But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years."
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"Those were some astounding lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father's talent for it."
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"If I could store lightnings in jars, I'd sell them to sick fireflies to light their way. Only they have nothing to pay for it with but life."
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"It's always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that's the person I'm going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it's there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain't me."
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"I think the idea of mixing luxury and mass-market fashion is very modern - wearing head-to-toe designer has become a bit passe. It's a new era in fashion - there are no rules. It's all about the individual and personal style, wearing high-end, low-end, classic labels, and up-and-coming designers all together."
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"While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another."
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"Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."
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"A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties."
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"I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story."
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"The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it."
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"There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident."
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"Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?"
23
"There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation surely we cease to be creative."
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"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."
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"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."
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"I consider myself as a singer first, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there's not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two fed off the other."
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"There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves."
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"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."
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"Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."
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"The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep."
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"They want more production and they want it cheaper. But no matter what happens, the creative idea will be perpetuated by somebody who comes up with a vision. I don't care if there are three ceos - it takes one guy with an idea."
23
"The future of fiction? he said. Maybe, she said. Will it have room for, you know, love & stuff? he said. Always, she said. OK then, he said."
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"I mean, the idea that Bar could have sent him off on a Grand Tour. But he wasn't the least bit interested. Why? Why isn't he interested in the world? Because here's the bad news for him: He's in the world now."
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"Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity. Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success."
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"Its limitations are those of the physical universe: it won't let you play with some really wild ideas that aren't possible, but are fun to speculate about."
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"She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling."
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"Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity."
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"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."
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"Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations."
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"I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with."
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"For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse."
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"To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all."
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"I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads."
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"There is only Love -- and Stories. All else is but a shadow dream."
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