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Creativity Quotes
"Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart."
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"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."
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"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.The lunatic, the lover and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name."
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"To write good poems is the secret of brevity."
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"Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,There! That's the truth!"
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"A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths."
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"Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind."
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"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
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"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession."
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"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
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"I write because I love. I love because I write."
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"Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you."
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"The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply."
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"She had her image and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper-and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further."
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"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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"When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
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"All of my bad ideas were always my best."
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"Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear language until she develops perfect pitch, but she also has to feel language, to know it sweat and dry. The writer finds the words are visceral, and when she can eat them, wear them, and enter them like tunnels she discovers the alleged separation between word and meaning between writer and word is theoretical."
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"Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable-we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job."
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"Positive Thinking and creativity are the powerful pairs to push the world forward."
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"Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don't be demotivated."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."
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"For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom."
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"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."
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"The light of artistic creation is also blinding.The artist can't see the suffering he causesto those around him. And the'll neverunderstand the purity of his goal, how the heatof his invention won't melt the ice in his heart.He must be ruthless!No religion, no purpose except this:Make something perfect before you die.Life is short, art is for all time."
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"The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself."
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"In the best interest of profession, a writer should sometimes refrain from writing."
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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."
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"A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way."
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"I write to understand as much as to be understood."
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"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."
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"Brainstorming is the nexus of ideas."
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"Want creativity? Diversify your experience to develop your creative muscles."
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"While the individual contributions provide the "building block of creativity, it is the collective consensus on what to do with them that is exciting."
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"When people wish for harmony, I wish for chaos. I'd rather see imaginative means of self-destruction, than to see laziness and wasted potential."
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"Conciseness is the sister of talent."
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"We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest."
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"You take a universal concept, something that has been done a million times (because everything has been done a million times), and add a fresh twist to it. Something no one saw coming. But mostly fresh writing! Keep it clean, simple, and compelling."
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"Through out your life people will project many things onto you. The projections are not about you, they are about them. Most will actually have very little to do with who you actually are. Remember this instead of reacting."
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"I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I'll watch for that book."
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"She burns like the sunBeautiful when she comes undoneNo restraintsPure passion flowing through her veinsMadness refusing to be tamed."
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"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another."
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"It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive."
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"No person, no matter how vivid an imagination he may have, can invent anything half so droll as the freaks and fancies that originate in the lively brains of little people."
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"You are only limited by your own imagination."
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"Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if you don't worry."
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