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Creativity Quotes
"It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones."
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"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
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"That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them."
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"But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career."
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"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."
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"If you want to change the world, change the metaphor."
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"We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making."
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"Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody "a creative person" is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the sense for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it.If you're alive, you're a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers--these are our common ancestors."
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"What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers."
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"Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
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"No person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people."
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"Stated clearly enough, an idea may cancel itself out."
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"Creativity is more important than imagination because it requires action."
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"Act one: put your characters in a tree. Act two: throw rocks at them. Act three: get them down again."
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"It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it."
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"Perhaps creativity's greatest mercy is this: By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir-something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration."
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"There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you."
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"The first time I saw a mermaid in my dream, and she looked so real...THAT.'s fishy!!"
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"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
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"The writer in her went silent and hid when her revealing words were wide-spread read."
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"Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot."
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"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."
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"The poetry of love is the greatest gift God gave us."
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"I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business."
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"When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time."
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"If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings."
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"I like my writing career and it's progression, I'd rather be that slow moving tide that turns a mountain into a beautiful beach for all to enjoy, rather than a flash in a pan that yields no heat."
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"Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?"
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"Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling."
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"You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought..."
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"How do I work? I grope."
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"Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation."
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"Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Lightthrough whom is splintered from a single Whiteto many hues, and endlessly combinedin living shapes that move from mind to mind."
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"You can't teach creativity at film school."
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"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
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"Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them."
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"I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things. Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it."
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"The world is not interested in titles and positions, all it wants is your creative mind and the genuinity of the work your hands."
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"Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad, it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness."
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"Science fiction is not prescriptive, it is descriptive."
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"You need feeling, emotion, to create. You can't create out of indifference."
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"Rain is nature's art; umbrella is man's art. When you walk with your umbrella in a rainy day, you walk with a super art which is a combination of two different arts!"
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"The secret is writing down one simple line after another."
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"I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in."
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"As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall."
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"One can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account."
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"Although I have the colors, only the Lord can mix them with such harmony."
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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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"An idea is an amazing creation of the human mind, which comes either asa result of one's continuous endeavors for solving a certain problem or justas a spark that lights up the considered problem."
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"A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men."
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