Quotes About Creativity

It's absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

What are you? To define is to limit.

Genius is lonely.

In another life I would have liked to be a poet, I just can't stop the lines in time, so I'm a novelist.

Fix your mind on truth, hold firm to virtue, rely on loving kindness, and find your recreation in the Arts.

Aspire to the principal, behave with virtue, abide by benevolence, and immerse yourself in the arts.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Moom' and 'tomb' actually rhyme, which is something Dickinson hardly ever did, preferring near-rhymes such as 'mat/gate', 'tune/sun,' and 'balm/hermaphrodite.

This gave me an early taste for humorous authors, of which there were—and are—far too few (though there are lots who labor under the misapprehension that they're funny.)

Are you making something up in your head, miss?" —FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A Little Princess Zener

Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.

No abundance of material goods can compensate for the death of individuality and personal creativity.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. [ Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction , New York Times, April 19, 1992]

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. [Interview, The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 20, 2009]

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. [ Interview with Oprah Winfrey , June 5, 2007]

Teaching writing is a hustle.

Writing is very subconscious and the last thing I want to do is think about it.