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Creativity Quotes
"Where the writing takes place doesn't matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author."
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"To dive in the darkness, I should dive in the truth, then in images of the world..., then facts, then in books, then listening, then in short stories... that's how I write the horror. It's very complicated."
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"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
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"It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries;but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else - things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things - but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word."
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"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes."
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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."
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"To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes."
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"Creativity is key to productivity and prosperity."
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"The human mind prefers to be spoonfed with the thoughts of others but deprived of such nourishment it will reluctantly begin to think for itself- and such thinking remember is original thinking and may have valuable results."
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"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."
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"You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal."
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"It might have been done before, but it hasn't been done by you!"
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"A writer's uniqueness glows and transforms the heart and the soul of a reader."
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"For as long as I write, I will never be lost."
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"The paper is my savior, the pen my blood, to words that shed my world."
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"Now is not the time for bigots and racists. No time for sexists and homophobes. Now, more than ever, is the time for ARTISTS. It's time for us to rise above and to create. To show humanity. To spread hope. We must prevent society from destroying itself, from losing its way. Now is the time for love."
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"It is the crimson tongue that paints the world others think they see."
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"The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."
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"I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated."
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"We write for the same reason that we walk , talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are."
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"Creativity is the most supreme form of love. When it flows from any heart flooded by truth and light, it can change all those who encounter its seductive vibrations."
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"If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do."
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"A single poem, alonecan turn tidesscatter galaxiesand burst forth with riversfrom paradise."
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"The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination."
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"Creativity is a massive and the sharpest voice that reaches every corner of the globe."
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"The greatest book is one written by your pen, but not exactly from your mind."
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"Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations."
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"I'm now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It's tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I'm safe. I don't have to face the consequences of 'real' aggressivity. I'm sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world."
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"Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book."
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"For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity."
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"Only the ideas that we really live have any value."
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"I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true."
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"I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don't know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn't ask to be flowers and I didn't ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, I had a shutting-off feeling that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK ."
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"I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'"
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"Throughout my childhood I believed that what I thought about was different from what other kids thought about. It was not necessarily more profound, but there was a struggle going on inside me to find some sort of creative or spiritual or aesthetic way of seeing the world and organizing it in my head."
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"A writer's breakthrough is a breakdown with a smile."
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"Open the access to your heart and write down what your voice is whispering..."
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"Create in your mind a picture of what you want and then live that vision as if it already exists."
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"This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold."
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"My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers."
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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."
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"Space and silence are necessary because it is only when the mind is alone, uninfluenced, untrained, not held by infinite varieties of experience, that it can come upon something totally new."
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"While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy."
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"What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,'.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come."
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"We write from soul of the heart."
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"The way to create art is to burn and destroyordinary concepts and to substitute themwith new truths that run down from the top of the headand out of the heart."
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"Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm."
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"Everything she sang was true. I will leave it to you as to whether the truth can exist with details omitted, or if those lacks make a lie of it."
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"The 'Muse' is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake."
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"A poetess is not as selfishas you assume.After months of agonising over her marriage of words-the bride-and spaces-the groom,she knows that as soonas she has penned the poem,it's yours to consume.So, without giving it a think,she blows on the inkand the letters fly awaylike dandelions on a windy day,landing on hands and lips, on hearts and hips.But more often than not,you can easily spotthem trodden and forgotten,becoming sodden and rotten.Yet, she will continue to makewhat's others to takebecause selfishness is not the mark of a poetess."
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