Quotes About Creativity

My songs are just little letters to me.

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.

Yes! Art is a conversation!

To put it opinionatedly, strumming an acoustic guitar is akin to scratching on the surface of a drum: antithetical to its nature.

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Through All That Happens As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling. Paris, February 17, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

Never Yet Spoken I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving. From The Book of Hours I, 12

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

Secretly she envied those who went out and about, while she remained in the grip of her sentences.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.

Whatever you do, be different. That was the advice my mother gave me, and I can't think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you're different, you will stand out.

Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can't think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you're different, you will stand out." - Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop. Via: eBetterBooks

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

Wendell Minor: I believe that children's books are the last pond in the Serengeti. They are the only place we go to drink for inspiration. All of us can still go - and do....

I do know happy marriages, including mine. But why write about something like that? I can't imagine writing, without irony, about people who are happy all the time.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I don't work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream--now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock, now I'm on this rock. In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character's head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid-out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.

I'm always amazed by my friends who were reading Samuel Beckett back when I was reading Wonder Woman. I didn't think about books much in those days. I took a creative-writing course in high school, but only because it allowed me to skip gym.

I only have a certain bag of tricks. And that's why little things, like punctuation, make such a big difference. The dash I've always relied on hugely. I know I use it even in borderline cases, where technically it isn't correct. But it moves me through the initial draft of the text, and I let a lot of my dashes stay.