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Creativity Quotes
"How are his poems?""He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way."
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"Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer -not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind."
2
"Chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets."
2
"Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry."
2
"Maybe stories are just data with a soul."
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"People tend to misinterpret imagination for being willing to do everything, instead of having the capability to put your mind to anything. There is a difference."
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"A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste."
2
"The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony."
2
"A writer off-guard since the materials with which he works are so dangerous can expect agony as quick as a thunderclap."
2
"It's the writing that teaches you."
2
"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
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"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
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"I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK."
2
"What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?"
2
"During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written."
2
"I am usually more impressed with people who are artful in shuffling a deck, than those who can masterfully play chess."
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"Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer."
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"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."
2
"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."
2
"When your madness is creative and necessary, people will not notice the fact that you are crazy."
2
"No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject."
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"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."
2
"I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author's mind, a glimpse of their creative soul."
2
"Now Leroux, what think youOf this twist to the story?"
2
"I think I'll dismember the world and then I'll dance in the wreckage."
2
"Even if the creative brilliance sparks only once, it needs to be accelerated and developed so it has self-sustaining strategies to continue adding value to both the initiator and those it serves."
2
"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."
2
"Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don't be demotivated."
2
"Once upon a time,' is code for 'I'm lying to you.' We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy-that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us."
2
"To be civilized is to be potentially master of all possible ideas, and that means that one has got beyond being shocked, although one preserves one's own moral aesthetic preferences."
2
"For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom."
2
"The first lesson in constructing viral content is having the strength, courage, and self-confidence to get in touch with your own feelings, thinking about what profoundly affects you."
2
"Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency."
2
"You can't write novels without a touch of paranoia. I'm paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to."
2
"Get in touch with your intuitive and creative powers, bring your desires to life in order to create a life of bliss."
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"Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas."
2
"The boys were amazed that I could make such a poem as that out of my own head, and so was I, of course, it being as much a surprise to me as it could be to anybody, for I did not know that it was in me. If any had asked me a single day before if it was in me, I should have told them frankly no, it was not.That is the way with us; we may go on half of our life not knowing such a thing is in us, when in reality it was there all the time, and all we needed was something to turn up that would call for it."
2
"Let your actions sing the best melody of life so that everyone can joyfully listen to it."
2
"A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit."
2
"You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed."
2
"The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer."
2
"You'll never be able to silence the woman who was born to write."
2
"Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense."
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"When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place."
2
"Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'."
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"You cannot write if you are not on fire."
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"Writing doesn't get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you're probably still learning the craft. You haven't perfected your style or landed upon your "voice. You haven't learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn't doing exactly what you want."
2
"Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new College in Oxford. You might like to see my collection of Oxford trees at Rob's Bookshop."
2
"Having an open mind is the most important precondition for creatingnew ideas."
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