Quotes About Creativity

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.

I just wrote a book. But don't go and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished.

He could easily invent an elaborate, plausible universe. But it is one thing to make that universe believable, and another to believe it. That is the difference between art and religion.

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher.

I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl.

In a sense, all fiction is experimental. Every new book is an adventure into unknown territory. As Hemingway told us, you (the writer) have to go out beyond where you have gone before.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

As the blind Milton's memory of light The deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone, Wrought joys for them surpassing all things known In our restricted sphere of sound and sight-- So while the glaring streets of brick and stone Vex with heat, noise, and dust from morn till night, I will give rein to Fancy, taking flight From dismal now and here, and dwell alone, With new-enfranchised senses.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

Design has killed architecture. Design is what they teach in the schools.

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If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

Honestly, orthodoxy concerns me about as much as it concerns your average jackrabbit. I only follow rules that take me where I want to go. If there aren't any rules, I make up my own (and follow them strictly).

As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit--subliterature.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Dreams take short cuts.

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.