Quotes About Creativity

Ray Bradbury

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.

The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, Well, to hell with you. And the cat says, Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do. Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?

Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

I'm gonna have a T-Shirt made that says 'Stand at the top of the cliff, and jump off, and build your wings on the way down

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I love to write. It's all I do.

See the world: It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Teachers say if you write a story you must never name what you're trying to write. Just do it. When it's over you'll know what you've done.

I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my wife, and our baby daughter.

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.

I'm a California boy. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me. (Paris Review Interview)

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado. JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

Because the Muse persists.

The good writers touch life often.

A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.

Each of the men I have listed seized a bit of the quicksilver of life, froze it for all time and turned, in the blaze of their creativity, to point at it and cry, Isn't this good! And it was good.

The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. In

In most cases I don't even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.

I been figuring, what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, 'Yes, sir, that's happiness.

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we'd die, we'd wander around and sleep like cats.