Quotes About Creativity

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists.

she has a blank sheet to write upon.

Language has a creative character: it is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstance but not caused by them – a crucial distinction – and can engender thoughts in others that they recognise they could have expressed themselves.

Education should not be a matter of pouring water into a vessel [...] it should be conceived as laying out a string along which learners proceed in their own ways, exercising and improving their creative capacities and imaginations, and experiencing the joy of discovery.

He was singing a song he had composed entirely without professional assistance.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

Everything is copy.

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

I think the hardest thing about writing is writing. [Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]

I think you often have that sense when you write-that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Arthur shook his head. 'I've always been terrible at colors,' he said, 'It comes from having grown up with the single-row box of crayons instead of the big box. If I'd had the big box I would now know taupe and cerise and ecru. Instead, all I know is burnt sienna. And what good does it do me? Never once I have I heard anything described as burnt sienna. Never once have I heard anyone say, Follow that burnt sienna car.

I can't understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.

Is what you think interesting enough to make the reader care? Are you saying something that no one has said? Above all, do you understand that you are not as important as what you're covering?

Write everything down. Keep a journal. Take more pictures.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

I had always zipped through that part of the speech as if I had somehow managed to be invulnerable to the fantasy, as if I had somehow managed to escape from or rise above it simply as a result of having figured it out. I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

Every time I hear writers talk about 'the muse,' I just want to bitch-slap them. It's a job. Do your job.

I didn't get fired. You didn't punch your boss and get fired from the Tribune? That's what I heard. I punched what could loosely be called a colleague for cribbing my notes on a story and since the editor–who happened to be the asshole's uncle–took his word over mine, I quit. To write books. Is it fun? I guess it is. I bet you killed the asshole in the first one you wrote. You'd be right. Beat him to death with a shovel. Very satisfying.

As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]--and then be damn sure you can make it work. But if you're going to try to write the virginal amnesiac twin disguised as a boy mistaken for the mother (or father depending how well the disguise works) of a secret baby, honey, you better have some serious skills. Or seek therapy.

I need to write to be happy.

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

You can fix a bad page. You can't fix a blank one.