Quotes About Creativity

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.