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Creativity Quotes
"There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."
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"Every word, every sentence, every poem and every chapter of a book I have written came from the bottom of my heart, it's very special and very unique to me."
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"There is only one rule for writing and that is go ahead and start writing."
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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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"The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem."
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"An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor."
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"And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers' poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there."
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"To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture."
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"A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion."
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"When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich."
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"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."
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"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees."
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"An adversity is an opportunity to exercise and maximize your creativity."
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"I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway."
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"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."
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"The ordinary think inside of the box, the extraordinary think outside of the box, but genius thinks inside, outside, below and above the box."
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"One man's insanity is another man's genius, someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity."
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"There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story., 1958)"
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"I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity."
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"I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer."
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"At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet."
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"Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out."
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"When I was young, my idea was to become a filmmaker."
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"Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature."
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"Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs."
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"The process of creation begins way before one starts writing."
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"Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,There! That's the truth!"
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"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
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"Creativity means bringing simplicity to the existing."
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"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession."
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"The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply."
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"That's the value of the artist... Even when they aren't aware, they're dreaming our dreams for us."
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"A good imitation is the most perfect originality."
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"It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on."
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"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
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"Our best canvas is all around us, in everything we touch and do."
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"A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea."
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"There is no greater power on this earth than story."
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"Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature."
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"Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery."
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"Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors."
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"I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching."
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"It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality."
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"In reading we must become creators."
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"Imagination is the dynamic catalyst for every breakthrough."
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"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."
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"Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions."
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"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it."
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"Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake."
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