Quotes About Creativity

We are different, my friend. We are visionaries. A monkey looks up and sees and banana, and that is as far as he looks. But a visionary looks up and sees the moon.

Write something every day,' she said, 'even if it's only a line, it will protect you.

Well you improvise with some people better than with others… [Mike Nicholls and I] had the same kind of playfulness. We enjoy the same kind of pretend. As kids do. You know. If he had come and said: 'I'm a doctor, are you sick?' I would have said, if I was kid: 'I don't feel good'. Because I wouldn't have said: 'Whaddya mean?' I would have known what he was doing. We were very childish for our age.

In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication.

Because the practice of writing is, then, a laying down of flowers upon flowers, it may be regarded as an exteriorization of what the imagining mind does, and of what it was doing long before it invented this external form of itself.

Pollyanna now, like Mrs. Snow, was knitting wonderful things out of bright colored worsteds that trailed their cheery lengths across the white spread, and made Pollyanna -- like Mrs. Snow -- so glad she had her hands and arms, anyway.

At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours.

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

I was inspired by the marvelous example of Giacometti, the great sculptor. He always said that his dream was to do a bust so small that it could enter a matchbook, but so heavy that no one could lift it. That's what a good book should be.

It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle…. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again…. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

His most influential song, "Matchbox Blues," popularized an image that had first appeared in one of Rainey's lyrics and would be recycled by everyone from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Carl Perkins, and the Beatles: "I'm sitting here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes / I ain't got so many matches, but I've got so far to go.

And maybe, just maybe, this summer will end up being one that people write songs about.

To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own. ...." I needed money and a backpack.

Authors go on writing books, and so we go on reading them. It is a sad state of affairs.

Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest...

With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.

Actors, painters, dancers, comedians, even just ordinary people doing ordinary things, what are they without an audience of some sort? See, that's what I do. I am the audience. I am the witness, I am the great appreciator that's what I do and that's all I want to do. I worked for a lot of years. I did a lot of things for a lot of years. Now, here I am in the rocking chair, and I don't mind it, Lucille. I don't feel useless. I feel lucky.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to ´´hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.´´ I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.´´

She is her odd self. The kiln has been fired. She is a person persnickity about keeping her house clean, but not above spitting on her desk to rub out a coffee stain. She will never be an athlete, or a mathematician, or a skinny person, or someone whose heart isn't snagged by the sight of fireflies on a summer night and the lilting cadence of a few good lines of poetry.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to 'hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.' I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.

John strums the guitar and begins to sing, "When I die / don't put me in the ground / Put my ashes in the ashtray / and drive me around." He sings the word around like James Taylor does, with a long a. Iris laughs. "Did you write that?" "Nope. A genius songwriter named Warren Nelson wrote that.

She thinks it was Margaret Atwood who said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their work was like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. So

A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.