Quotes About Creativity

I always say, I'm certain I changed 'Watchmen' less than the Coen brothers changed 'No Country for Old Men.' I'm certain of it. But you don't hear the Cormac McCarthy fans, like, up in arms about it. They should be. It's like an amazing Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling, it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.

I knew when I was writing The Angel's Game that a lot of people would be upset that I didn't write Shadow Of The Wind 2. That's okay, that's part of the game. You do what you have to do. If they like it, great. If they don't, too bad. What are you going to do?

For some reason, I never felt the need to have kids. My wife feels the same. We don't feel a void. I don't think they would give my life meaning. I do think of the books as my children, though. Whatever is inside of me, I put into my books.

I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

There are 360 degrees, so why stick to one?

It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies

I really don't limit myself in any way. I just search for great flavors and marriages wherever they come from.

I got killed against Morimoto. I brought out white plates with food; I thought that was really nice. He brings out sculptures of ice, Noah's ark made of balsa wood that he carved at his restaurant downstairs, smoking trees ... When I saw that, I looked at my sous chef and I'm like, we're toast.

We had a bar chef. We made our own bitters. I treated the bar like I treated the restaurant, like [bartender Albert Trummer] is the chef here. He'd light the bar on fire; back then no one would give a shit. It was exciting because of what we did and the vibe. The design was nice but it was the people, the food and talent. It was a hotel restaurant and we made it really special.

I always go to the lowest common denominator for that ingredient. So if I think squash, I try to think what it means to me -- and if it doesn't mean anything to me, I'm not gonna do well when I cook it. So [squash] means to me: fall, maple syrup, cinnamon, and things just come into your head so you can narrow the vortex and make it a bit smaller and you go with something because there's no time.

You've got certain guys that just want to be famous and then you've got the real musicians that just love playing music.

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

How do you know that nonsense isn't a good thing? If human nonsense had been nurtured and developed for centuries, just as intelligence has, then perhaps something extraordinarily precious could have come from it.

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

I guess you have to be a little arrogant to be a writer. I decided early on that just because a lot of other writers were bothered by getting bad reviews didn't really mean that the things were particularly important. By the same token, the good ones didn't mean all that much either. So I just forget about reviews and I wrote what I wanted.

Go and copulate with yon purple lizard.

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -- you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.