Quotes About Creativity

Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks.

Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write.

You do not create ex nihilo. You rearrange and recombine. You are the same old flour and eggs in search of a new recipe.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.

When you write a page and delete the whole thing, there is a sense in which it is not deleted. The better writer who remained behind is still there.

I have wanted to "make books" since around the sixth grade, and I published my first book when I was in my late thirties. My point is that the time in between was not wasted—submarine service, marriage, college, bringing up three kids, starting a school for them, and so forth. This kind of life experience is not distracting you from your appointed task of writing. It is, rather, the roundabout blessing of giving you something to say.

If clichés were candied fruit, walnuts, and raisins, the Book of Psalms in The Message would be a three-pound fruitcake.

The trick is to state what we know in a recognizable fashion but in a way that is slightly off, in a way that arrests us.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

A lot of aspiring writers quote the right people, but they do so like Mary Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. They quote Austen like Mary quoted her eighteenth-century bromides, and were Austen here to see them do it, she'd slap them right into her next book, and it wouldn't be pretty.

The independence of art from worldview and worldview concerns is a myth. Every work of art is produced within a framework of worldview assumptions.

What happens when we grow up? (We may try to put away childish things, but we can't, or shouldn't. The best thing that can happen is that we turn those things into something bigger and more beautiful.)

You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.

I've looked at pictures that my mom has of me, from when I was four years old at the turntable. I'm there, reaching up to play the records. I feel like I was bred to do what I do. I've been into music, and listening to music and critiquing it, my whole life.

An eminent Iranian composer, Pezhman Mosleh, has honored me with this gift (the piece of On the Threshold).

Crowns of flowers and laurels are the inventions of free people.

The heart of success, the painter of mind.You are the great masterpiece. Practice it high.

Always have some project under way . . . an ongoing project that goes over from day to day and thus makes each day a smaller unit of time.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. — John Cage

Embrace the AI present and design your own human life

The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.

A brilliant invention isn't much until some idiot calls the genius who created it an idiot.