Quotes About Creativity

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

There is an important difference between the politician who is simply an able tactician, and the politician who is a creative political

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labor, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom—with no reason to explain its presence—no mission to fulfill—a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.

An artist's career always begins tomorrow.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you've done, not because the research you've done.

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. ( James Meek in interview with TMO )

he preferslive music to a patron's humdrum spheresIs this permitted? when u are mozart yesHe's living now? As what? a black rock starwhatever that is.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.

the great thing about literature is that you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can't.

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

Any symbol system that does not encourage a transcendence becomes a prison.

Hard at work on a new one, huh? What's this one called?" "A Feast of Souls." "A Feast of Souls," Ben said. "Classy." I slowed, unsure whether or not I had detected a hint of sarcasm in my neighbor's tone.

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.