Quotes About Creativity

In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.

A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.

poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs.

I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel "a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it." She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: "I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.

If I even do get to be a fine writer it will not be because I am a fine writer, but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so as far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not. The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits.

Only art could make fiction beautiful; only reality could sustain such intense art

Tell The Reader To Go Jump In The Lake The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer. ~Flannery O'Connor

I am not a warthog from hell.

Anyone who has survived childhood, has enough material to write for the last of her life.

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

You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God, to use or not use as He sees fit.

i write because i don't know what i think until i read what i say

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Let us intoxicate ourselves with ink , since we lack the nectar of the gods

and since, human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars

Writers should be orderly and predictable in their lives, so that they can be ferocious and sinister in their work.