Quotes About Creativity

It's bad to get up early, stand at your typewriter and work, then find it's nothing and take a bottle to bed.

The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.

The great thing about growing up with science fiction is that you have an interest in everything.

I try to keep up with what's being done in every field, and most children's books are ten times more enjoyable than the average American novel right now.

This is the emotional thing, you see — you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it's only in his head, to get by himself in his own world.

Intuited novels are far more 'true' than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!

He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

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.

He must ask himself, "What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?" and begin to pour this on paper.

Los buenos escultores tocan la vida a menudo. Los mediocres sólo pasan apresuradamente la mano por encima de ella. Los malos violan y la dejan por inútil.

Fuego brillante Posfacio de Ray Bradbury, febrero de 1993

We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

La gente no habla de nada. Citan automóviles, ropas, piscinas, y dicen ¡qué bien! Pero siempre repiten lo mismo, y nadie dice nada diferente. [...] ¿Ha estado en los museos? Todo es abstracto. Mi tío dice que antes era distinto, Hace mucho tiempo los cuadros decían cosas, y hasta representaban gente

Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation

Un hombre de la Tierra piensa: «En ese cuadro no hay realmente color. Un físico puede probar que el color es sólo una forma de la materia, un reflejo de la luz, no la realidad misma». Un marciano, mucho más inteligente, diría: «Este cuadro es hermoso. Nació de la mano y la mente de un hombre inspirado. El tema y los colores vienen de la vida. Es una cosa buena».

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.

Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange—we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. there is nothing magical in them, at all. the magic is only in what books say , how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this. you are intuitively right, that's what counts.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. Make your own individual spectroscopic reading.

I fell into my typewriter with it and came up with a brand-new, absolutely original tale, which had been lurking under my skin since I first drew a skull and crossbones, aged six.

God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.