Quotes About Creativity

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.

I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.

I think you can have moderate success by copying something else, but if you really want to knock it out of the park, you have to do something different and take chances.

To make this world a whole lot brighter, when I grow up I'll be a writer.

Nurture an appetite for being puzzled, for being confused, indeed for being openly stupid, and that - despite what you may think - is very difficult...We all know the cliche' that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It is also true that a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing as well...use your ignorance as well as your knowledge for creative means.

Moreover, there is so much more that needs to be said; but book writing is like picture painting in this regard: it can never be "done," never "perfected." One must simply find a good stopping place, and I pray that I have chosen such a place to stop working on this particular project.

I'd love to work with Sufjan Stevens. He so gets it. He's amazing.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

The pictures were the only items in the file that weren't complete fiction.

said he had a "unique artistic vision," which wasn't exactly a lie. His vision just happened to be shit.

writers instinctively tried to generate plots from events around them as a means of survival, the way a pigeon is always searching for food, pecking at everything in sight. A spy lacked the imagination or the drive for that kind of free-association creativity.

That's how Rihanna started," Ian said. "I have a hard time picturing Rihanna singing 'Hava Nagila.

Kristen Murphy

You see, more than a simple matter of putting down words, writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.

Naturally, you don't sit down in "white hot inspiration" and write with a burning flame in front of you. But since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer, and Mockingbird put itself together for me so accommodatingly, I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.

I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much.

You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences.

Ibsen is at heart an optimist. He could not close his life's work with a note of negation. When We Dead Awaken is a clear, ringing call to the future.

Realism and art cannot live together.

Labels don't mean anything to me. I'm trying to play as passionately as I'm able to. If they want to call that cool, that's fine. Just spell the name right, is the formula.

My own image of my work is that I no sooner settle into something than a break occurs. These breaks are always painful and depressing but despite them I see that there's a consistency that holds out, but is hard to define.

Television is simply automated day-dreaming.