Quotes About Creativity

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

In writing, you either stick with it and keep revising until it's done, no matter how long it takes — or set it aside a few years until you've distanced yourself enough to get it right. The wait is just as excruciating as the work.

Writing helps keep me sane — or at least a pen's length from insane.

The best writers always make poetry, whether it comes out prose or verse.

Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.

He transforms every bottle of ink into a scrolling trail of metaphors.

Love letters and poems aren't the least bit difficult to write, if you write directly from your heart into the ink and don't channel through your brain first.

Writing — a race to the typewriter keys before that brilliant idea flees

Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains — God composes, why shouldn't we?

EDITOR... a bit of sandpaper applied to all forms of originality by the publisher-proprietor...

If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don't remove it — I may be writing in my dreams.

There are living days and there are writing days. But you can never have the writing without the living. And if you've got writer's block you'd better go have yourself a day of living to fix it, rather than beating on an idling brain.

You should write and read all day...

A harsh critique is a pen stab through the heart — and the resultant inkbleed.

They'll find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys.

Calligraphy, a spiritual art that has been forgotten in favor of an emotionless keyboard.

One ought to write only when one leaves a piece of one's flesh in the inkpot each time one dips one's pen.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait.... "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away.... Everything is a self-portrait.

"And when once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." "But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any other way you can." "To be sure... I have seen a litherary gentleman in a sponging house do crack things on the wall, with a bit of burnt stick..."

Man is the most alive of living things. In him the traits which distinguish the animate from the inanimate become most pronounced. This is particularly true of his creativeness, which is essentially life giving. It introduces order into the randomness of nature... and is actuated not only by the present environment but by memories and goals.

The only gift is a portion of thyself.... the poet brings his poem... the farmer, corn... the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in his gift... But it is a cold, lifeless business, when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.