Quotes About Creativity

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible - actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision - these set a distance.

Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.

Si es absolutamente necesario que el arte o el teatro sirvan para algo, será para enseñar a la gente que hay actividades que no sirven para nada y que es indispensable que las haya.

Cel care scrie a doua oar? Werther este un farseur care ÅŸtie Werther pe dinafar? ÅŸi-l transcrie, din memorie. AÅŸa ÅŸi situaÅ£ia literar? a României: repet?, mai prost.

MADELEINE: Well, then, if you've always been such a sober-sides, if you've nothing seriously wrong with you, if all your faculties are still intact, wake yourself up a bit, get to work, write your masterpiece . . . AMÉDÉE: I tell you I've no inspiration . . .

Si no se comprende la utilidad de lo inútil, la inutilidad de lo útil, no se comprende el arte. Y un país en donde no se comprende el arte es un país de esclavos o de robots, un país de gente desdichada, de gente que no ríe ni sonríe, un país sin espíritu; donde no hay humorismo, donde no hay risa, hay cólera y odio.

Un país en donde no se comprende el arte es un país de esclavos o de robots, un país de gente desdichada, de gente que no ríe ni sonríe, un país sin espíritu; donde no hay humorismo, donde no hay risa, hay cólera y odio.

the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating... that collectedness and presence of mind...the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and the creating, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without a break.

Poezia este destinata poeziei si nu publicului. Poetul nu are nevoie de public. Publicul confunda poezia cu sansoneta.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing, or thinking about writing.

It is a disservice to any form to elevate it as the form.

Writing is my vacation from living

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.

It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.

T. H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist and author of the "infinite monkey theorem." Huxley's theory says that if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece—

If there are frightful monsters in fairy tales, they do not frighten you now, because that kind of monster is no longer going about the world, whatever he may have done long, long ago. He has been turned into stone, and you may see his remains in museums.