Quotes About Creativity

I try all night to play a pretty note.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

There's something missing in the music industry today... and it's music. Songs you hear don't last, it's just product fed to you by the industry.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

It's not the tales of Stephen King that I've read, I need protection from the things in my head . . .

If life gives you limes make margaritas.

which, of course, is how I developed my love for both Kabuki theater and marshmallow Peeps.

I went and bought a half ounce of cocaine and, in one week, assembled the entire Live Rust album and movie soundtrack. In a week. Y'know, it's not the drugs, it's the attitude that goes with 'em. - David Briggs

I warn her not to chase money— chase a dream, like underwater photography or hiking, build your own boat and sail around the world, serve and protect the earth, that's the kind of stuff brilliant minds pursue, not moneyed soul-shrinking status sh**— integrate your heart and soul into your walk, talk, hands and thrust your voice up to the sky as you sing your life out pure, free, hard and strong against any wind.

The new music is] building off something that wasn't very good in the first place. Back before the singer/songwriter, a very competent musician did the music, and a very competent lyricist did the words. But everybody does both now, so you've got a lot of mediocrity.

There's a point where one finds one's own voice and that's when it really starts to matter. The things that inspire me as a thirty-seven-year-old are very different from what inspired me as a twenty-year-old.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

Arithmetic is the death of story.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

Only in art were there cliches; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.

On a shrunken planet where nearly every mountain bears bootprints and every mile of river has been run, being 'first' tends to require creative task definition" (111).

any form of expression that ceases to be an experience and becomes an art form loses its glowing divinity"

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

Something is visiting, but it may not be the muse...

One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.

Let's pursue excellence together. Let's make art. Let's build the future. Let's be our best selves.

There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.

And what he had offered me was exactly everything I most wanted —to make art, to build the future, to help each other become our best selves. "He honors me.

Writers are not nice people. We can't be.