Quotes About Creativity

When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like 'Saint George and the Dragon' or 'The Rape of the Sabine Women,' but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they're all you. You are every color and brushstroke.

Magic happens in the rewrite!

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Do you write novels? I said. Novels, Lord no, she said. I can't even stay married.

Writers, it is said, all carry a chip of ice in their hearts

Magic Success Formula for Writing: Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and write!

Every writer is a reader first.

Nobody wants you to be an artist or a writer, Maggie said. Not only did the world not care if you ever painted a picture or wrote a book, the world kind of wished you wouldn't. Your challenge was to do it anyway.

For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.

just imagine!" I ejaculated.

All creative scientists know that the true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions they uncover the laws of truth.

That is why I opened Santiniketan under the shady trees and the glories of the sky." He motioned eloquently to a little group studying in the beautiful garden. "A child is in his natural setting amidst the flowers and songbirds. Only thus may he fully express the hidden wealth of his individual endowment. True education can never be crammed and pumped from without; rather, it must aid in bringing spontaneously to the surface the infinite hoards of wisdom within.

The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in

The intimate yet tense interrelationship among these three forces -- humans, earth, and fire -- makes my soul tremble. I don't believe creative impulse can exist without the trembling of the soul.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of fiction? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them.

If any man love the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

If any man loves the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.