Quotes About Creativity

There is a fine line between knowing the stats your self-publishing generates and living your life around them. Some authors check their Amazon rank several times a day. That can only lead to madness and walking the streets talking to yourself.

Whenever I go to a hospital to visit someone, I must confess that half my mind is thinking, Hm, this would make a good detail in a scene….

Take a nice, long walk. Don't think about your book. Have a little notebook or recorder with you. You'll find the "boys in the basement" sending stuff up. When they do, write it down, and keep walking. (Note: I love Stephen King's metaphor of the "boys in the basement" from his book

James Scott Bell

Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.

By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn't support–his knowledge of falconry for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands or the ways that the ruling class behaved–should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.

A poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.

Why do you live on the bank of a river?' was one of these questions. 'Because a poem in a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.

Originalitatea nu const? în a spune ce nu a mai spus nimeni, ci în a spune exact ceea ce gândeÈ™ti tu însuÈ›i.

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Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised

Live life by the abc's...adventure, bravery and creativity.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Half the places I have been to, never were. I make things up. Half the things I say are there cannot be found. When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods. I dug myself. But why? I thought the tale of treasure might be true. You said you made it up. I know I did, but then I didn't know I had. I forget things, too.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption. A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.

I admire the person who can write it right off. Mencken once said that a person who thinks clearly can write well. But I don't think clearly--too many thoughts bump into one another. Trains of thought run on a track of the Central Nervous System--the New York Central Nervous System, to make it worse.

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.

Figure 4: Illustration of the T-shaped

Genius" means extraordinary intellectual ability, and people use the word in two different but related ways. In one sense, genius means high intellectual potential; in the other sense, genius means "creative ability of exceptionally high order as demonstrated by total achievement." This book uses both meanings.