Quotes About Creativity

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.

Asking "what if" and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person's perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. "That's why I'm a writer.

What does anyone want out of life? What kind of freak do you suppose I am? I miss books and good verse and decent talk. I miss women, to speak to, not to rape; and children, and men creating things instead of destroying them. And from the time I wake until the time I find I can't go to sleep there is the void—the bloody void where there was no music today and none yesterday and no prospect of any tomorrow, or tomorrow, or next God-damned year.

Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.

Well, get the coffer out, said Tobie roundly. You find his clean clothes and I'll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and I'll sit him on my knee and move his arms up and down. Where is the problem?

I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening.

Determined to look on the bright side of things, Philippa collected her winnings, and ate them. 'I don't know,' she said. 'We're a nice, representative group. I can do card-tricks, and you can train animals and Haji Ishak can he on nails and Sheemy Wurmit can do a comic turn with his parrot and Signor Manoli can swear in ten different dialects of Sicilian. We only need a good bass-baritone and a tenor rebec, and we could work out a tour.

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.

I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself

Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.' Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. 'And this salt-spoon,' he said, with childlike enjoyment, 'can be the body.

Most people don't associate anythin'--their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.