Quotes About Creativity

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière , sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.

Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.

There is only one school: that of talent.

how can I write about this when I am afraid of not having time to finish and of stirring up all these thoughts in vain?

Geniusz to brak przystosowania.

Great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.

You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.

I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.

I will contend until I am shot that art as soon as it is brought into contact with politics inevitably sinks to the level of any ideological trash.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. [Vogue, interview, 1969]

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle.

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head--everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Las aptitudes artísticas no son caracteres sexuales secundarios, como han dicho ciertos charlatanes y chamanes, sino todo lo contrario: la sexualidad está al servicio del arte.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control.

Las regiones apacibles y vagas en que me movía eran patrimonio de los poetas, no el terreno del crimen

offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.

Oh no, I do not gloat over my own person, I do not get all hot wrestling with my soul in a darkened room; I have no desires, save the desire to express myself — in defiance of all the world's muteness.

I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no purpose than to get rid of that book....