Quotes About Creativity

You can't negate the ingrained imagination of a whole culture.

It is like a deep pool, this imagination, and during the day it gets used up, like water, and when we sleep at night the water we have used during the day gets replaced. And if it is not replaced, if there is none to drink of, we are thirsty. It is from sleep that God gives us our strength and our power and our peace, do you see.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

Should you dare to ride this dreadful beast, you would awaken later as if from a deep sleep, with some of these printed scraps clutched in your hands. Fragments would hint at ideal books, impossible books, books that you have always longed to read.

If your mind jumps to crazy story ideas from little things you see all around you, you might be a writer.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.

When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem 'with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse'.5 Aubrey Beardsley's caricature of Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde at Work', shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

the theatre was the greatest of all the arts.

novelists only Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jorge Luis Borges have

series of infatuations for admired writers.

would always advise any young writer for the theater to do everything—to adapt plays, to translate plays, to hang around theaters, to paint scenery, to become an actor. . . . There's a bottomless pit in the acquisition of how to tell an imagined story to listeners and viewers.

Three cheers have invented the wheel.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

Like a musician, the Pathan had learned how to make a song out of his loneliness. Like a magician, he had learned how to use sheer air to contort limp pieces of rubber into objects of happiness. Empty-handed, he had built a world.

You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

but the attitude reading and writing gives you

In second grade, she'd snuck up on a napping Eva and colored her entire forearm with a highlighter. Because she was "important.

But she'd never wanted kids. Books were her kids.