Quotes About Creativity

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!" it said. "I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!" "You burn prettily," I said.

If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

Many of my better short stories are just the last chapters of novels I did not write.

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something - or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.

Hell, we make our own ifs. I had better things to think about than what could have happend

I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing.

No two authors can render the same story in the same fashion.

Sangre de Cristo foothills rising up to Santa Fe Baldy, a great gray-topped mound of a mountain, its summit often graced by snow. As described in the interview, this peak helped inspire his novella "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.

Or supposing humans had developed different abilities than those they have now and had learned magic rather than, say, calculus . .

You drew me, in exquisite detail, on several packs of playing cards.

I spat sand so I would not choke when I laughed. Hell, we make our own what ifs. I had better things to do than what could have happened.

don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than wanting to design something — or wanting to be a writer, rather than wanting to write. It should be a by-product, not a thing in itself. Otherwise, it's just an ego trip.

Had I known at the time how well I wrought, said Yama, I might have numbered its days intentionally. Occasionally, do I regret my genius.

When there is no real hope we must mint our own

The chalks and slates fascinated them. They yearned to hold the white sticks in their hands, make little white squiggles like the other children, draw pictures of huts, cows, goats, and flowers. It was like magic, to make things appear out of nowhere.

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

Depression comes when, in the depths of despair, I cannot manage to save myself by my attachment to writing.

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive , when it thinks.

One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring.