Quotes About Creativity

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.

I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It's a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster.

I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in.

The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.

The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction.

Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel.

What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not.