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Creativity Quotes
"Masochists hold on to broken people. Artists hold on to broken memories."
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"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."
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"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
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"The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision."
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"Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)"
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"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."
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"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself."
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"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."
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"Creative person's spirit and soul dance with passion and imagination."
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"A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons."
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"Creativity expands the mind, stretches it beyond ordinary human comprehension, resulting in the mind being elastic and capable of transcending and discerning complex ideas."
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"You are the end of beauty and creativity one must have created so far."
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"Things you crave for won't come if you cry, but when you craft and create. Creativity digs up the buried gold."
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"For a poet reality is mysterious, imaginations are magical, and perceptions are magnificent."
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"Stories give color to black and white information."
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"The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind."
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"You need fire, conviction, to write. You can't write out of indifference."
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"I had one of those ideas I do sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class."
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"Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can't walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It's what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day."
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"Originality is the key to being memorable."
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"One of the great things about being a writer/journalist is that my boss loves me to go out and do features on being someone else. I did a feature on Kate Middleton, where I went to an incredible fancy state home in the countryside, put on a wedding dress and posed for engagement pictures with a fake Prince William."
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"We don't want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want."
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"So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them."
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"The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life."
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"Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged."
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"I like a story that could never happen to me. If I want real life I'll read a newspaper."
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"If you have a spark of genius, kindle it until it becomes a flame."
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"Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all."
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"The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires."
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"Creativity is a continual surprise."
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"Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."
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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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"Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
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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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"Have you thought of doing it? Being a cattle farmer? If that's what it's called? I think we should do that, but replace cattle with bunnies and then we don't milk or eat the bunnies. We just let them multiply. Then we'll take over the world. Me the queen. You the king. Our bunnies the army nobody can defeat."
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"Beautiful mosaics are made of broken or torn material. The most spectacular personal brands are compilations of the same."
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"I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess."
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"I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation."
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"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees."
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"Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things."
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"Novelty is the fuel on which the imagination runs."
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"But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write."
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"Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time."
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"Insomnia is the act of pushing through sleep to achieve the art of insane creativity."
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"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
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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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"Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."
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"The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert."
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"Any fool can kill. It takes genius to create."
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