Quotes About Creativity

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer's block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

I haven't had writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly.

They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....

People are bored. They're dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I'd drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What's missing? What do they need? What's the next step? And then I got it: imagination . We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly. You can't write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

We work in the realm of the impression." Nell hailed a taxi and directed the driver to East

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says.

I managed to memorize half of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and would mutter stanzas to myself when I was bored, alone, or at aerobics class.

His eyes weren't closed like they used to be when he'd make Danny tell about an ice castle on Pluto where a band of pirates lived. But wanting to be told a story, entertained, however that looks on a person's face--Danny saw this now and remembered it. It filled him with relief.

Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

People had to do something to shake things up or they would've keeled over from misery and boredom. So Christ came to dinner. Witches and goblins were hiding in corners. People looked at the sky and saw angels. And my idea--my, my...plan, my-- Mick: Mission. He didn't pause in his sanding. My mission is to bring some of that back. Let people be tourists of their own imaginations.

We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead.

I see now that the place I've been yearning for is my own imagination.

Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can't seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

You can only write regularly if you're willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.

I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing — fire it right in my chest. I'll die gladly for some fresh language.

Anybody can buy. It takes an artist to shop.

Is there anything more fundamentally human than the desire to live in another world, as someone other than our own earthbound selves?