Quotes About Creativity

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion then she lies.

When I have had enough of tears and love, I turn to some poet, and set out again for a new world.

Who can explain the reasons for a daydream?

Each man's soul is his genius.

If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.

I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.

I was in a vicious cycle: writing and reading seemed to be the only way to beat back the loneliness, but they also reinforced it

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult.

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological.

Literature is subservient to nothing but truth.

A good work can be communicated across languages ... [provided one does not] fall into the trap of narrow-minded nationalistic or chauvinistic thinking.

Writing is a kind of repository and can help create a space for the accommodation of new thoughts and feelings. If you don't write these stories down, your heart will be filled up and broken by them.

Writing can be a source of strength -Wang Liang

La escritura es una especie de sala de exposición, y un almacén que puede ayudar a crear un espacio para dar cabida a nuevas ideas y sentimientos. Si no pones estas historias por escrito, tu corazón se colmará de ellas y se romperá.

Are all things quantifiable, and all numbers fraught with poetic possibility?

When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing." - Yoko Ogawa

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one.

I suspect the only reason I've been able to go on writing is that I've had your heart by my side all along. — Y?ko Ogawa, The Memory Police , transl. Stephen Snyder (Pantheon, 2019)

You can't write with your head. I want you to write with your hand," he said. It was rare for him to make a pronouncement like this, so I found myself simply nodding in silence. Then I stretched my hand toward him, fingers extended. "That's right. That's where the story should come from," he said, but he looked away, as though he had seen into the most vulnerable part of my body.

Having written this phrase, I set down my pencil. My new novel wasn't going very well. I seemed to be writing in circles, going backward, or running into dead ends, with no idea what should come next. Still, I often encountered this sort of writer's block, and I no longer took much notice of it.

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.