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Creativity Quotes
"Create content to add value, not to get likes."
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"At Wal-Mart, if you couldn't explain an idea or a concept in simple terms on one page of paper Sam Walton considered the new idea too complicated to implement."
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"A writer is a world trapped in a person."
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"Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting-that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art-and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort."
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"Reason enables us to get around in the world of ideas, but cannot prescribe our thoughts."
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"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."
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"According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course."
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"A good writer is a magician, she unfolds the dark secrets of mind."
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"If life's pen passion is ink!"
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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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"A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission."
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"Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation."
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"If I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur."
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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."
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"To describe and explain my ideas is to lose them."
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"General Grant had no fixed plan of campaign beyond the general idea to avoid the strong defensive line occupied by General Lee behind Mine Run, and find a way to draw him out to open battle."
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"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."
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"Wrote you a poem or two. You didn't enjoy them, but I did for you."
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"Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author."
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"The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision."
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"Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form."
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"Innovation is creativity with a job to do."
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"People are creators. But I doubt that many realize this. We are not meant to go out into the world and find flawless things, we are not meant to sit down and have flawless things fall into our laps. But we are creators. We can create a beautiful thing out of what we have. The problem with idealistic people is that they see themselves as receivers instead of creators, they end up hunting for the flaw in everything in order to measure it up to their ideals. Now, when you see yourself as a creator, you can look at a chunk of marble and see the angel within it. Then you carve until you have set that angel free."
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"The final reward of the dead - to die no more."
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"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."
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"Creativity is contagious. Pass it on."
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"A good dose of fantasy is exercise for your sensibilities, it keeps your avatar strong."
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"Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul."
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"Let your imagination takes you to where you wish to be."
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"She slid on the helmet. "Thanks, Prince Charming." "Huh?" "You know, Cinderella," she said. "The prince had her slipper and you had my helmet..."
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"Art should be for sale. The artist should not."
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"Letter-writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."
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"We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery."
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"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door."
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"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."
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"The revolutionary Mozart is the Mozart of his last eight years."
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"I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it."
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"Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic."
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"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."
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"Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process."
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"Creativity expands the mind, stretches it beyond ordinary human comprehension, resulting in the mind being elastic and capable of transcending and discerning complex ideas."
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"No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated."
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"Begin to read, write, sing, dance, study, draw!"
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"This book had two authors, and they were both the same person."
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"One needs to pursue some sort of a creative interest in order to keep life from eating us alive."
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"I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit."
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"Not all writers are silently suffering inside. But it certainly helps."
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"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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