Quotes About Creativity

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may. - from My Olivetti Speaks

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE Make the stage an actor Make an actor the stage.

The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is that all about? What is it for?

Kenneth Oppel

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be.

Every time [some software engineer] says, "Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that," there's some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble. — Alex Mayfield

Don't bitch or punish the world: just create. Create something nobody's ever seen before and there is a good chance the world will notice you. Attacking teen girls on the internet is the saddest form of masturbation that exists and requires no discernible skill or talent. Because if you're not being useful in this world, you're being useless. Don't be useless: go make stuff that makes people happy.

Make a thing where there was none, kids. It's crazy what it can lead to.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it's hard to summon it when you really need it.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

Even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls

I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing..and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

I see a creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsieur Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.

Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important-looking lines

Kinder sind nicht wie Malbücher, Du kannst sie nicht mit deinen Lieblingsfarben ausmalen.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

Sad stories make good books.

Les enfants ne sont pas des livres de coloriage. Tu ne peux pas les peindre avec tes couleurs préférées.