Quotes About Creativity

I've got my Motown girl-group music playing, and my supplies are laid out all around me in a semicircle. My heart hole punch, pages and pages of scrapbook paper, pictures I've cut out of magazines, glue gun, my tape dispenser with all my different colored washi tapes. Souvenirs like the playbill from when we saw Wicked in New York, receipts, pictures. Ribbon, buttons, stickers, charms. A good scrapbook has texture. It's thick and chunky and doesn't close all the way.

When I write, I hold nothing back. I write like he'll never read it. Because he never will.

but as anyone who's ever scrapbooked knows, Rome wasn't built in a day. You could spend a year or more working on one scrapbook.

First published in the US by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers,

I lay flowers and chocolate-covered hearts at your feet for all the beauty you bring to each book.

Meanwhile, everybody's looking through songbooks, trying to decide what songs to put in.

Stevie Wonder.

You know, I read a study that found that baking is actually therapeutic. It's something to do with the repetition of measuring ingredients, and creativity. Psychologists call it behavioral activation.

It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.

It can be kind of gruesome at times, making things alone.

Jenny Nimmo

What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.

She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea. But only possibly.

The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped writing on a grocery list She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea. But only possibly.

Jenny Offill gets at this idea in a passage from her novel Dept. of Speculation—a passage much shared among the female writers and artists of my acquaintance: "My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Il mio piano era non sposarmi mai. No, io volevo diventare un mostro d'arte. Le donne non diventano mai mostri d'arte, perché i veri mostri d'arte si preoccupano solo d'arte e mai di cose terrene. Nabokov non si chiudeva nemmeno l'ombrello, era Vera che gli leccava i francobolli.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.

Sometimes I find myself having little conversations in my head with the punk rock kids upstairs.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

What did you do today, you'd say when you got home from work, and I'd try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

It's not knowing that drives you mad. It's imaging things that you wish you couldn't think up all by yourself.

Children who "play well" become enterprising and active adults.

I don't understand you. I can't treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.