Quotes About Creativity

It's kind of like wearing a baseball cup. I want to call it the Mangina." "That's a good name for it. . . . Where are the other vaginas you made?" Chandler brought over to me a plastic bag and dumped out all the failed vaginas on to his drafting table.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up.

I know a lot of artists. The greatest loves of all their lives are their creations. Unfortunately most of us don't have that kind of talent, so we have to make do with falling in love with real people.

I sat in airport hell wondering once again why there is nothing to do in airports. Why hasn't some enterprising genius yet realized all us bored ticket holders would adore, flock to, pay hard cash for any diversions that lasted longer than a cruise through the magazine racks or dull necktie store?

That's what writers do, Conroy, we wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them.

I live and breathe art",' said Phoebe. ' "What other people refer to as 'the real world' has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison".

Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

Nobody gives a tinker's fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain

Remind me again what's wrong with Dave Matthews? Basically everything, except technical proficiency, Walter said. Right. But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. 'Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can't live without my freedom, yeah yeah.' That's pretty much every song.

H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying, Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.

She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.

Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?" "I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.

Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

So many Jonathans . A plague of literary Jonathans .

All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world.

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

We are preparing a generation of robots. Kids are learning exclusively through rote. We have children who are given no conceptual framework. They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills. As a result, they can be given no electives, nothing wonderful or fanciful or beautiful, nothing that touches the spirit or the soul.

His family feared he might one day succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet.