Quotes About Creativity

I know very little of my own work by heart, because I don't like what I write. In fact, I find myself personally expressed far better in the writings of other poets than in my own, because I know all my mistakes—I know all the chinks and all the padding, I know that a particular line is weak, and so on. I read other poets in a different way; I don't look too closely at them.

Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman la vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.

Por el acorde que no hemos oído, por los versos que no nos encontraron (su número es el número de la arena), por el inexplorado universo.

If you ask me why I wrote "A thousand tambourines of crystal, wounded the light of daybreak –Mil panderos di cristal, herían la madruga," I will tell you that I saw them in the hands of trees and angels, but I cannot say more: I cannot explain their meaning. And that is how it should be. Through poetry a man more quickly reaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician silently turn away from.

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 otros.

Their lack of imagination makes them cruel.

Tôi luôn m??ng t??ng r?ng Thiên ???ng cÅ©ng t?a tá»±a nhÆ° má»™t thÆ° vi?n v?y

Un gran libro como la Divina Comedia no es el aislado o azaroso capricho de un individuo; muchos hombres y muchas generaciones tendieron hacia él. Investigar sus precursores no es incurrir en una miserable tarea de carácter jurídico o policial; es indagar los movimientos, los tanteos, las aventuras, las vislumbres y las premoniciones del espíritu humano.

I think of myself as being essentially a reader. I have ventured into writing, but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes—yet one writes not what one would like to write but what one is able to write.

has gastado los años y te han gastado, y todavía no has escrito el poema.

A writer lives. The task of being a poet is not completed at a fixed schedule. No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary.

I understood that the work of the poet was not in poetry; it was in the invention of reasons for poetry to be admirable; Naturally, this further work modified the work for him, but not for another.

T]he aesthetic act cannot be carried out without some element of astonishment, and that to be astonished by rote is difficult.

Uno de los hábitos de la mente es la invención de imaginaciones horribles.

If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning than the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favourite books, reader, are like rough drafts of that book without a final reading. - Literary Pleasure

Before I ever wrote a single line, I knew, in some mysterious and therefore unequivocal way, that I was destined for literature. What I didn't realize at first is that besides being destined to be a reader, I was also destined to be a writer, and I don't think one is less important than the other.

Comprendí que el trabajo del poeta no estaba en la poesía; estaba en la invención de razones para que la poesía fuera admirable;

En una ocasión le pregunté a Alfonso Reyes por qué publicamos, y Reyes me contestó: «Publicamos para no tener que pasarnos la vida corrigiendo borradores».

Son el irresponsable juego de un tímido que se animó a escribir cuentos y que se distrajo en falsear y tergiversar (sin justificación estética alguna vez) ajenas historias.

There is nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. - Prologue to The Tiger Guest, P'u Sung-ling

Mir Bahadur Alí, lo hemos visto, es incapaz de soslayar la más burda de las tentaciones del arte: la de ser un genio.

La segunda, que un famoso poeta es menos inventor que descubridor.