Quotes About Creativity

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvelous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

You forget, I said, I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

The secret of genius is to carry the child into old age.

And I'm not a poet: but never despair! I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?

It is not enough for the phrases to be good., what you make with them ought to be good too.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

This is not drawing,' he cried, 'this is inspiration!' 'I had meant it to be drawing,' was Constable's characteristic answer.

And it's what you never will write, said the Controller. Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone with a mind like Shelley's can write Prometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his contemporaries and none at all with posterity.

If you want to write, keep cats.

But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say ... Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.

Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?

Did you ever feel," he asked, "as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out?

If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

No has tenido nunca la sensación de que dentro de ti había algo que sólo esperaba que le dieras una oportunidad para salir al exterior? ¿Una especie de energía adicional que no empleas, como el agua que se desploma por una cascada en lugar de caer a través de las turbinas?

Éste es el precio que debemos pagar por la estabilidad. Hay que elegir entre la felicidad y lo que la gente llamaba arte puro. Nosotros hemos sacrificado el arte puro.