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Creativity Quotes
"If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that."
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"Had I learned to fiddle I should have done nothing else."
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"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."
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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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"I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do."
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"My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth."
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"The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?"
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"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."
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"Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas."
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"No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough."
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"Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job."
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"Everybody is born creative, but very few people remain creative."
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"The bright light of brilliance keeps the darkness away, but it can be so very exhausting."
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"The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning."
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"If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever."
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"He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts."
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"The poetry of love is the greatest gift God gave us."
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"He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written."
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"When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time."
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"I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
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"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."
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"I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot."
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"Write and people will come to read. Write and people will heed to your words and share them with others. Not all may relate, but wait, and those who were meant to see it eventually will find it, for truth waits to be found. It searches for no one."
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"Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least."
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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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"Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world."
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"Most people die with their music still locked up inside them."
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"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day."
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"When the world falls asleep, authors weave the stories that are called dreams.. and when authors dare to jot down.. that's called making dreams come true."
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"Innovation comes from the Latin, "Innovare - It means to change or alter things that already exist."
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"I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in."
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"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
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"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love."
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"I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh."
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"The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!"
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"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."
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"People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels."
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"The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge."
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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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"To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start."
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"It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones."
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"It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books-not part of me, all of me-and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be."
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"If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it."
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"The function of the bridge is to mind the gap, the wonder of the bridge is to create a scene."
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"I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page."
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"The revolutionary Mozart is the Mozart of his last eight years."
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"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"
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