Quotes About Creativity

think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life," Edith later wrote, "and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't. So with men.

It was said in the office "that Sam had three hundred ideas a minute, but only JSP knew which one was not crazy.

I find that without a place to work, it is difficult to work. I look forward with the greatest pleasure to the use of my books at night at home.

If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't. So with men.

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life," Edith later wrote, "and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful.... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

Such people, such individuals, will be a most productive yeast and ferment, and lucky the society who has plenty of them.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

He believed from the beginning that the heart and soul of an advertising agency is its creative work.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.