Quotes About Creativity

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

She saw the world through a dazzling prism of authentic imagination.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.

Lila Wingo would take the raw material of a daughter and shape her into a poet and a psychotic.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.

Because I've gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

I could rent Caesar out at birthday parties. Halloween parties. I could take pictures of Caesar eating a piece of birthday cake. Or a picture of a kid riding Caesar on his birthday. We could build a saddle.

she was writing a letter in her beautiful penmanship, her sentences all like well-made bracelets.

As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.

When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, Is this necessary at this point in the book?

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle.

Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn't be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I'd be laughed at, humiliated—and I'm old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As

As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I'm supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don't quite know it. But I trust I'll begin to know it soon.

She honored the margins; the wild side made all the difference.

It's dangerous to write about what you don't know, I said. Ledare got up to go and said, It's dangerous not to.

He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom.

In contrast, team synergy is born out of the differences between team members. The more distinctive the diversity among the team, the more options they have to creatively deploy themselves against goals, decisions, problems, and opportunities.

The lack of diversity is harmful to the vitality of a healthy team ecosystem—the climate needed to engender creativity and insight. For it is the diversity of experiences, perspectives, and skills that introduces increased quantities of creative solutions.