Quotes About Creativity

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

I was a weird little kid. I was very irritable, bored, frustrated. I felt my imagination bubbling inside my head without having any way to express itself. Given a crayon and paper, I would not draw a train or a house. I would draw these monsters, beasts and demons.

In my Art I have but one fear: that we will fail to be fearless.

Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own.

and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader's dreams with dreams of their own.

Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.

I don't plot or outline, though I may take a few notes here and there, instead I let my dream world fill up each night with a segment of the story. I do this without worrying about it, or trying to force it, and when I wake up the dream bag is full, and I can go to my writing desk, and dream all over the page.

We're making strange fictions of strange things inside ourselves.

Dream! Forge yourself and rise Out of your mind and into others. Men, be women. Fish, be flies. Girls, take beards. Sons, be your mothers. The future of the world now lies In coral wombs behind our eyes.

In his perversity, or his genius, or both

That which can be imagined need never be lost.

I begin. I write a draft without ever looking back. Without ever touching what's gone before. Because I think it will be shit, so I daren't look back. I write a draft. I start again. I have the text when I start the second draft and then I do the same thing a third time. - To Linda L. Richards, The January Interview

Here let me be quite clear: the primary impulse behind such creations is not escapism. That implies a kind of cowardice in the face of the world, which is not what inspires such visions. Quite the reverse. It is a hunger to see more clearly that fuels the true fantasist. A desire to express the world's transforming heart.

By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down.

I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things...

That which is imagined need never be lost.

Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.

As much as you feel as though you need to find some relevant bit of information for your story to work, research distracts from your writing and inevitably leads you down a rabbit hole of websites and articles and, more than likely, the temptation of checking your email or your Facebook profile or the baseball scores on ESPN.

What matters is there's something in you which is unique to you. And that's the only thing that matters. Not being the next Clive Barker, not being the next… whatever. What matters is being the next whoever you are. The only whoever you are. And - right or wrong - I'm the only Clive Barker.

It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.

Hayal edilen asla yitirilmez.

So you can't please all the people all the time. All you can do is what pleases you, and hope that it pleases other people. I love my readers, and I respect my readers, but I'm not going to simplify or echo myself, copy myself, just so the sales will be better.

If I've learned anything from two decades of fantastique writing it's that the more extraordinary the subject matter the more specific the details need to be.