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Creativity Quotes
"The more obscure our tastes, the greater the proof of our genius."
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"The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme."
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"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination."
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"It is a bird's imagination, not its wings, that determines how high it can fly."
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"I always said you have to be really smart or really dumb to play this game well. I just don't know where I fit in."
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"Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by 'Augie March.' It's easy to set something in Indianapolis - we don't have 'Augie March' here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it's intimidating."
19
"I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection."
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"Many of us learned to repress our creativity. We were told it was secondary to more important skills. The good news is that many of us have untapped gifts just waiting to be expressed. You owe it to yourself to uncover and express your gifts."
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"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."
18
"I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality."
18
"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."
18
"An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor."
18
"There are days when my imagination in my enemy. It likes to keep me company in my darkest of times and romanticizes a past that was more of a horror story than a fairytale."
18
"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
18
"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."
18
"No. 1, Halliburton. Certainly, if they've overcharged they should be whacked and whacked good, but the idea that the vice president somehow is involved in this, whether they got contracts because of him, that's nonsense."
18
"Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure."
18
"For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed."
18
"I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..."
18
"Neruda had his first dream, First meeting with the Moon and the Sun In sunny La Mancha, hiding in his heart,Where he learned how to sing like a nightingale."
18
"So much of a novelist's writing, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
18
"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"
18
"In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos."
18
"In order to write about life first you must live it."
18
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write."
18
"We are souls, eternal and perfect, captains of our mystic ships: gods and goddesses of our universe. We are beautiful, we pearls of grit. We, the ember of everything. Our uniqueness IS what makes us special, and the expression of it is our gift to the rest of us. In order to feel happy and fulfilled, we must honour our own personal brand of creativity... let it out into the world... BE who we came here to BE."
18
"Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line."
18
"My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything."
18
"I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity."
18
"It does not matter what you write in English nobody has understood it anyway."
18
"Angel dust blown a sunder,Nestling on the edge of unchartered dreams,Filtering the dileneation between ones desires & needs."
18
"There can be no forced inspiration."
18
"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."
18
"The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge."
18
"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."
18
"A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents."
18
"If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!"
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"I'm just a girl, with a pen and a dream."
18
"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
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"The idea of a language more simple than ours."
18
"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."
18
"Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference."
17
"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking."
17
"Creativity is an amazing human characteristic, which is more connected with curiosity than with knowledge."
17
"We need music," Nico said. "How's your singing?""Um, no. Can't you just, like, tell it to open? You're the son of Hades and all.""It's not so easy. We need music."I was pretty sure if I tried to sing, all I would cause was an avalanche."
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"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."
17
"Play is the highest form of research."
17
"Unwritten words grow out of silence."
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"The imagination goes where it will, you can be set aloft by it, or you can cage it with reason."
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