Quotes About Creativity

Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on.

Genius is 1 inspiration and 99 perspiration.

Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something.

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed — the thought gives me a headache.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Believe me, the real romantic person is him who ain't done anything but imagine. If you have actually participated in disasters, like me, you get conservative.

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

wonderful to relate)

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

In a sense, every story or poem is a vacation.

Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.

And muse on nature with a poet's eye.

Books should be like magical jewelled boxes. It's the writer's job to tell the story. My job [the artist] is to make you want to pick up the box, and to peer inside.

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised.

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).