Quotes About Creativity

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.

Writing is the greatest thing that can happen to a human being. It's the best.

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could've been good. There's an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can't, it doesn't matter how skilful you are...

I myself have never enjoyed anything more than writing. I love to live in that world.

I write to give myself a strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I just thought, 'Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It's like, 'Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It's super important for my law!

Sometimes you might make up a story and tell it to other people

An untrue story that is told for fun is called a fantasy.

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don't have the words." —

I thought my dance alone through worlds of odd and eccentric planets that no one else knew would sustain me.

Until the passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, it was illegal for Native citizens to practice our cultures. This included the making and sharing of songs and stories. Songs and stories in one culture are poetry and prose in another. They are intrinsic to cultural sovereignty. To write or create as a Native person was essentially illegal.

It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?

Every collection of poetry makes a force field of energy. When creating you give yourself over to it. In the fiercest moments of imagination the artist may not know where they are going, the how and when of it, and it doesn't matter. What matters is the process regenerates and meaning shifts at every turn.

We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness.

Each collection of poetry makes a force field of energy.

The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.