Quotes About Creativity

the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–-

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost. The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold. Herman Melville at breakfast, feeling a sardine to his cat. Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics. The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.

The isms go, the ist dies, art remains

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art.

A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, would really work; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.

The mind writes with a pen, the heart, with a pencil.

You have to be an artist and a madman...

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

What are these hopes, and who is this savior?" "Imagination," replied Cincinnatus.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.

I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art

and in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more simply, not a single human who can speak; or, even more simply, not a single human; I must think only of myself, of that force which urges me to express myself. I repeat: there is something I know, there is something I know, there is something...