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Creativity Quotes
"People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature."
15
"Calliope was never still. Even when she was seemingly motionless, he could see her mind at work, sorting ideas, seeking solutions, cataloging the space around her. To see her beauty, one had to see her in motion."
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"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."
15
"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
15
"I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry."
15
"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy."
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"The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say."
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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."
15
"Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform."
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"I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true."
15
"Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark."
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"And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing."
15
"I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down."
15
"I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im."
15
"Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all."
15
"A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places."
15
"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."
15
"My dear Copperfield, he replied. "To a man possessed of the higher imaginative powers, the objection to legal studies is the amount of detail which they involve. Even in our professional correspondence, said Mr. Micawber, glancing at some letters he was writing, "the mind is not at liberty to soar to any exalted form of expression. Still, it is a great pursuit! A great pursuit!"
15
"Life is an experiment, experiment by sending as many ideas in the universe and see which idea takes off and put your heart into that."
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"Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting."
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"To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another, the artist never emerges from himself."
15
"David Bowie was my creative northstar, a muse, an inspiration to me from the age of 8. He was a special soul on a mission, and the mission is now complete. I know he is truly home now among the stars."
15
"All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't."
15
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
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"I try to avoid stories that end with...and he was never seen again."
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"When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process."
15
"Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen."
15
"A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste."
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"If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself."
15
"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."
15
"A brainstorm about the difference between rain and brain: a b, although both are juicy like water... but if it rained in the brain would that mean that ocurred a brainwash? and if so what would be the cure for that?? That's rough for sure. But if the rain plays mainly in the land would it land instead of fail to fall?? What's the meaning of it all? i'm a brainiac with some brainy thoughts.."
15
"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."
15
"Knowing how to dream is more important than the story, because the story tells itself."
15
"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"
15
"Instead of thinking outside the box,Get rid of the box."
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"I've written for the waste basket so often that we've become friends. He writes too, but it's mostly garbage."
15
"Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something."
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"The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in."
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"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."
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"I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do."
15
"Surprise is where creativity comes in."
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"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it."
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"You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit."
15
"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."
15
"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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"It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones."
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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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