Quotes About Creativity

I like to write books that I would have liked as a child, that would have got me thinking and imagining beyond the words on the page. In a way, my audience is always how I remember myself as a child.

I don't write for an auditorium full of people. I don't write for the microphone; I write for the page.

My sketchbooks are usually just a line on one page or a circle, which to most people must be totally meaningless. But to me, they are very important to the thing I am working on.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

For me, the bottom line is what's on the page.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

What's on the page dictates a lot of what I do. When the words are there, it's easy.

I see a lot of scripts, and very few of them leap off the page at you.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

My work should speak, not being spotted on Page 3.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.

I continually blacken pages and scribble away, so I always have a number of songs that are half-finished.

For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, 'How could we do an episode about that?'

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'