Quotes About Creativity

To see things in the seed, that is genius

Someone remind me why I didn't want to be an accountant when I grew up," Brock drawled. Niko chuckled. "Because accountants don't get to make things go boom.

Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it's ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you.

It's not like I'm sitting at home coming up with some secret beauty plan.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones … who burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.

Doing a lot of reading is not the prerequisite to writing.

A clever trick does not a concept make.

I have chosen this thing to do, away from my family, the doors closed, characters who form in my head and move to the paper, black symbols on a white sheet, no more than that.

If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.

You take what you're given, whether it's the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It's all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.

When you're not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom.

I wanted to make a living, but I really was not interested in money at all. I was interested in being a great comedian.

There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting, thinking to myself, That scene would've been so much better if I had written it out.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for people telling you that you are nuts.

One does not have humor. It has you.

I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block?" No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.

Professional writers don't have muses; they have mortgages.

NED: I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E. M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, john Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjöld . . . These are not invisible men.

And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?" Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

Style, after all, is a kind of humor, Something truly beneath contempt...

You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.