Quotes About Creativity

He dribbled noise.

How important is it to be 'important' as a writer?

The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

Anyone who doubts that caffeine is a drug should read some of the prose composed under its influence.

That's what it means to be out of your mind. To let yourself be carried away by a dream. To give it room, let it grow wild and thick, until it overruns you.

I'd love to be an artist that's multifaceted. At the moment, I am not. But wouldn't that be cool if I was like, 'Yeah, let me pull out my guitar and play you a song.' I would adore that. I am so far not gifted in that way. But I am a very hard worker and a very determined person, so who knows?

Quite frankly, I didn't become an actor to become a movie star. I have never dreamed about being the most famous person on the planet. I just want to do really good work.

When we de-repress the fear of death, we reclaim the energy that has gone into denial. We feel buoyed up as streams of creative energy course through our bodies, minds and nervous systems. By facing a subject that usually depresses and terrifies us, we feel lighter, freer, more perceptually and cognitively alive in all our encounters....Old age will no longer be a synonym for death, or dying, but for living.

E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

My dad was an editor and a writer, and that's actually what I aspired to be.

Only dreamers can teach us to soar.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm sick of this poem, you probably are too.

What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

Oh, Tongue, give sound to joy and sing Of hope and promise on dragonwing

Necessity breeds solution.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

I think it's a terrible thing to write and not enjoy it. It's a sad thing. But of course a lot of people do work because they need to eat. And we all need to eat, but that's not the only reason to work. You couldn't have paid me not to write.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.