Quotes About Creativity

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.

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

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down a a typewriter and bleed. E. Hemmingway We don't write to be understood, we write to understand......... Love yourself. Dare to dream. Live on purpose!

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

Please do it your own way. Do it in the mornings when your mind is cold Do it in the evenings when everything is sold. Do it in the springtime when springtime isn't there Do it in the winter We know winter well Do it on very hot days Try doing it in hell. Trade bed for a pencil Trade sorrow for a page No work it out your own way Have good luck at your age.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

We need more true mystery in our lives Hem- he said. The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most. There is of course the problem of sustenance

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 you know.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... 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.

The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.

Some writers are only born to help another writer write one sentence.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.

When it's right you can't remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great and unbelievable surprise. You can't believe you did it. When it's once right you never can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you're only allowed so many in your life.