Quotes About Creativity

I have an idea for a story. I keep the idea in a special place in my brain and I pull it out every once in a while to examine it, expand it, let it breathe.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house. It's as though I could fly, almost, and I get very tense before I've told the truth — hard. Then I sit down at the desk and get going with it.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly.

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.

Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.

My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.

Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

I have a room of my own. Rain drops onto it. Rain drops down like worms From the trees onto my frontal bone. Haunted, always haunted by rain, the room affirms The words that I will make alone. — Mother And Jack and The Rain.

He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

the drunken poet (a genuis by daylight)

I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone—I'm on my 8th draft of this play and how many more—God knows.

A woman who writes feels too much, Those trances and portents!

Aunque la lluvia maldiga la ventana/ hágase el poema

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy, has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast, sat by the potter's wheel at midday, set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.