Quotes About Creativity

I can't do a weekly column," Valentine said. "I don't even have a monthly period yet.

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, my ass. American ingenuity amounted to squat in this place.

Orson Scott Card

But humanity doesn't want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive. And the way we do it is by straining and straining and, at last, every few generations, giving birth to genius. The one who invents the wheel. And light. And flight. The one who builds a city, a nation, an empire.

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

Yet in your stories, you must imagine all these things, not just because it will make the world of your story more complete, but also because the very completeness of the world will transform your story and make it far more truthful. As your characters move through a more complex world, they will have to respond with greater subtlety and flexibility; the constant surprises they run into will also surprise the reader - and you!

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories.

Take one idea that you've been struggling with, combine it with a completely unrelated idea that you've also been working on, and see what comes out of the effort to reconcile both ideas into one coherent story.

The story is nothing like what you first thought it would be. But so what? It's better - richer, deeper, truer - than the original idea. The idea did its work: it got you thinking. After that, if you feel bound to stick to it no matter what, that idea becomes a ball and chain that you drag with you through the whole process.

Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

you'll dream, too.>

It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.

Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. Be of good heart, cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.