Quotes About Creativity

In fact, there's nothing like travel to swing wide all the artistic channels,

I have never understood the saying 'To think outside the box.' Why would anyone sit inside of a box and then think outside of it. Rather just get out of the box.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, "People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange.

The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

Art like life is an open secret.

Don't Let That Horse . . ." from A Coney Island of the Mind. Don't let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall's mother But he kept right on painting And became famous And kept on painting The Horse With Violin In Mouth And when he finally finished it he jumped up upon the horse and rode away waving the violin And then with a low bow gave it to the first naked nude he ran across And there were no strings attached

telling over to myself/ how beauty never dies/ but lies apart/ among the aborigines/ of art/ and far above the battlefields/ of love

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman.

I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

I didn't know that painters and writers retired. They're like soldiers – they just fade away.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.