Quotes About Creativity

I suppose an active imagination can be a form of madness. Or it can be the thing that keeps you from going mad.

Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

The ability to go anywhere in our imagination is a pure expression of individual freedom. It is a creative force that can help us transcend reality.

At one time you pursued Stephanie with great creativity, but no more. There's an assumption—and you're not alone—that we need only pursue what we don't yet possess. The trick is that in order to keep our partner erotically engaged we have to become more seductive, not less.

Eroticism, intertwined as it is with imagination, is another form of play. I think of play as an alternative reality midway between the actual and the fictitious, a safe space where we experiment, reinvent ourselves, and take chances. Through play we suspend disbelief—we pretend something is real even when we damn well know it is not. Earnestness has no place here.

Love arises from within ourselves as an imaginative act, a creative synthesis that aims to fulfill our deepest longings, our oldest dreams, that allows us both to renew and transform ourselves." Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are.

If you don't want to be in a story, don't know a writer.

Go for the hum.

Layton combined dialogue, song, and dance in a fluidly shifting action

Like Oscar Hammerstein, LaChiusa knows that characters express themselves in their own wording as well as their own music.

One must also accept that one has 'uncreative' moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

The art that speaks [truth] most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.