Quotes About Creativity

For the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind. It is not by weighing, balancing, trimming, expanding with conscious intention, that an excellent piece of art is born. It takes its shape and has its origin outside the region of the conscious intellect. There is much that the conscious can do, but it cannot provide you with genius, or with the talent that is genius' second cousin.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning's paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head:

If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.

Always your first question to yourself should be, "What would I be doing now if it were really impossible for me to fall at – whatever it is: traveling, modeling, writing, farming?

The only way to do this successfully is to have a well-thought-out set of standards drawn up for each type of work that you do, and in advance. If you wait till anyone item is finished you may find yourself reasoning after the fact, defending the fact-accomplished, and perhaps blinding yourself to real insufficiencies in it.

Long before Freud made his contribution to modern thought, Pico della Mirandola, in a treatise called De Imaginatione—Concerning the Imagination—was discriminating between two kinds of revery: the one retrograde, backward-turning, keeping the man from his man's work, prolonging irresponsibility and mental childhood; the other, the true imagination, was found in the successful man.

Every book, every editor, every teacher will tell you that the great key to success in authorship is originality

Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer-the craftsman and the critic in him- are actually hostile to the good of the artist's side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

Write to your fear.

You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then... you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

It wasn't because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying. But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture.

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

Christian philosophy of work was this. God is our creator. God made us in His image and likeness. Therefore we are creators. He gave us a garden to till and cultivate. We become co-creators by our responsible acts, whether in bringing forth children, or producing food, furniture or clothing. The joy of creativeness should be ours.

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

my subconscious so full it must spill over

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend's Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity so have some little frocks but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

Molly was bending over the table where her masterpiece, the white and silver cake, towered above her lesser achievements in the shape of patties, canapes, rolls, sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. A current of goodwill flowed from Molly through the food to the people who ate it and back again the same way. Her good cooking made the connection; she seemed to need no other.

Nurturing. Janet remembers some of her childhood fantasies in which she was doing really terrible things to very small people, so she could cradle them like dolls afterwards.

We can none of us say why this thing, or that thing. The book was done written when the characters were born.