Quotes About Creativity

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

I no longer believe in literary schools now; I believe in the individual.

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in Olalla when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. - The Total Library

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Cuando, en Ginebra o Zurich, la fortuna Quiso que yo también fuera poeta, Me impuse, como todos, la secreta Obligación de definir la luna. Pensaba que el poeta es aquel hombre Que, como el rojo Adán del paraíso, Impone a cada cosa su preciso Y no verdadero y no sabido nombre.

If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.

Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliations, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

De los diversos instrumentos inventados por el hombre, el más asombroso es el libro; todos los demás son extensiones de su cuerpo… Sólo el libro es una extensión de la imaginación y la memoria".

Yo he escrito también algunos cuentos en los cuales traté ambiciosa e inultimente de ser Kafka

El ejercicio de las letras es misterioso; lo que opinamos es efímero y opto por la tesis platónica de la Musa y no por la de Poe, que razonó, o fingió razonar, que la escritura de un poema es una operación de la inteligencia.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

Si vous traduisez Shakespeare, il faut traduire aussi librement que Shakespeare écrivait.

Je n'écris pas pour une petite élite dont je n'ai cure, ni pour cette entité platonique adulée qu'on surnomme la Masse. Je ne crois pas à ces deux abstractions, chères au démagogue. J'écris pour moi, pour mes amis et pour adoucir le cours du temps.

A veces en las tardes una cara Nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo; El arte debe ser como ese espejo Que nos revela nuestra propia cara. (At times in the evenings a face Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror; Art should be like that mirror Which reveals to us our own face.)

In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.

The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral. He must be true to his imagination, and not to the mere ephemeral circumstances of a supposed 'reality'.

Comprendí que el trabajo del poeta no estaba en la poesía; estaba en la invención de razones para que la poesía fuera admirable; naturalmente, ese ulterior trabajo modificaba la obra para él, pero no para otro.

Poetry is given to the poet. I don't think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.

On lit ce qu'on aime, tandis qu'on écrit pas ce qu'on aimerait écrire, mais ce qu'on est capable d'écrire.

And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien--poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.