Quotes About Creativity

A dystopian story must not merely be dystopian; it must also be a story. Premise can only get you so far.

You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing.

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.

The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, 'closer than your own heartbeat,' accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy. The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring. This is the message we most need to hear.

To be a good writer, become a good listener.

Ideas, he knew from experience, arrived in their own good time, dressed exactly the way they wanted to be and saying only as much as they felt like.

She felt funny, strange, making up lies as quickly and smoothly as if she'd been doing it all her life.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. [ The New Statesman , February 25, 1933]

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

Horrors might burst out of them. But something must burst out, sometimes, if men are not machines.

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

The human soul needs beauty more than bread.

Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we've never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us, whether it concerns our grandchildren or not.

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

She drops her art if anything else catches her. Her contrariness prevents her taking it seriously - she must never be serious, she feels she might give herself away. And she won't give herself away - she's always on the defensive. That's what I can't stand about her type.

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Art-speech is the only truth.