Quotes About Creativity

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

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

You know the fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

No. It's bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you're going mad for me.

A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.

you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out.

All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures.

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.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually

I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.

I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Tal vez, lejos de París, podría escribir sobre París tal como en París era capaz de escribir sobre Michigan.

He had destroyed his talent by not using it

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

Writing. It is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

Inaccrochable - A picture a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either. -said by Gertrude Stein