top of page
.png){kind=small}
Creativity Quotes
"Creative living is a path for the brave."
3
"I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result. I promised that I would try to be brave about it, and grateful, and as uncomplaining as I could possibly be. I also promised that I would never ask writing to take care of me financially, but that I would always take care of it - meaning that I would always support us both, by any means necessary. I did not ask for any external rewards for my devotion; I just wanted to spend the rest of my life as near to writing as possible - forever close to that source of all my curiosity and contentment."
3
"If a demon and a vampire mated, their offspring would be unique but in harmony, like a Labrador retriever crossed with a poodle. Voila, labradoodle!But a vemon was a made creature, as if one took the front half of the Lab and jammed it onto the back half of thr poodle. In other words, wrong."
3
"This is what is behind the special relationship between tale and travel, and, perhaps, the reason why narrative writing is so closely bound up with walking. To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain that the author as guide - a guide one may not always agree with our trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere. I have have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into distances so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is traveling."
3
"If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate."
3
"If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction."
3
"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
3
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."
3
"He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read."
3
"Masochists hold on to broken people. Artists hold on to broken memories."
3
"Your heart influences your art."
3
"I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people."
3
"You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't."
3
"An imaginative mind is a place where you can find magic."
3
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
3
"Broken pencils still write beautiful songs."
3
"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."
3
"Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted."
3
"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."
3
"I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right."
3
"Artists," he said, "are people who say, 'I can't fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!"
3
"I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything."
3
"I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour - write, write, write."
3
"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."
3
"Writing is like life: it goes on."
3
"Creative person's spirit and soul dance with passion and imagination."
3
"Sing your own song. There are always some earnest listeners."
3
"Something must be birth out of whatever He has given you."
3
"Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?"
3
"Develop your own skills and styles. In music, designing, electronics, etc., you may have a peculiar way of exposing your dreams in an uncommon way."
3
"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."
3
"A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons."
3
"We are writing the history of our time."
3
"Writing fluency sometimes needs an intense agony somewhere in your mind."
3
"I write what I like to read, and I enjoy love triangles in YA and adult fiction - not to mention in other media like TV, opera, theatre, and even in video games! I relish when dark and compelling characters compete for our protagonist's heart. The doubts, the uncertainty - the jealousy! - can be breathtaking."
3
"You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done."
3
"I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape."
3
"My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions."
3
"Pseudo-artists think that being an artist means opposing whatever seems to be an establishment. That is not creative at all. True creativity is the ability to gain perspective wherever you may have missed it before."
3
"I'm just a girl, with a pen and a dream."
3
"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."
3
"Dance with your rhythm."
3
"All the time she writing the world had continued."
3
"As we write we summon little demons."
3
"You think the thing, draw the picture and then it happens."
3
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."
3
"The artist has the master picture in his mind, before he begins to paint."
3
"You are the end of beauty and creativity one must have created so far."
3
"First drafts don't have to be perfect. They just have to be written."
3
bottom of page