Quotes About Creativity

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. . . A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch. . . oh, there are loads of rules. (pg. 88-9)

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie. 'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.' 'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.' 'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.

Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.

Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer?

Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.

Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.

It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there's a lot of erasing and rethinking

Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting.

Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?

Influential books are often a disappointment, if they're properly influential, because influence cannot guarantee the quality of the imitators, and your appetite for the original has been partially sated by its poor copies.

A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living.

writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.

There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication. something both timely and timeless

How could there be a bad song called 'Iron Man', or 'War Pigs', or – my cup ranneth over – 'Rat Salad'?

She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.

We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That's the thing about television comedy, isn't it? It makes us all a part of something. That's what I love about it.

There aren't any buts," said Bill. "That's the whole point of being a writer, isn't it? If I wanted buts, I'd go and work in a fucking but factory.

Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent.

Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented