Quotes About Creativity

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Starting a novel is like standing in a field and waiting for lightning to strike.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

What is technique but the absence of passion?

Be daring, take on anything. Don't labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

so too, her glazed ceramics and her macramé are interchangeable with those executed by her women friends in the area, who take courses at the Mill Brook Valley Arts Co-op and whose houses are gradually filling with their creations, like ships gradually sinking beneath the weight of ever-more cargo.

Joyce Carol Oates

Keeping busy" is the remedy for all ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Fucking macramé knots were maybe harder than they looked.

Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.

and much more interesting.

I still remember typing the title page on my manual Smith-Corona with clammy hands and a racing heart. When I came to the words, A novel by Joyce Elbert, I heard the New York Philharmonic break into Wagnerian praise for a major new literary voice, yet seconds later doubt and insecurity had crept in.

I had never been productive in beautiful, serene settings. I needed noise, activity, some kind of external energy to get me going.

This is the day God has made, and I am going to enjoy it. I can handle whatever comes my way today through Christ Who is my strength. Today, I am energetic and creative. I have favor with God and man everywhere I go. Everything I lay my hand to prospers and succeeds. I enjoy being a blessing to others. I am thankful for all that God has done for me. God is working on my problems, and I can wait patiently because His timing is perfect.

Aunque el famoso compositor Ludwig van Beethoven no fue literalmente encarcelado, se quedó sordo casi por completo y sufrió una gran tristeza durante

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that's who forms our poetics.

When the poem throttles your innards, that's when you got to hit the paper and arpeggio the keys—it's up to you.-Juan Felipe Herrera @cilantroman