Quotes About Creativity

That's what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks' thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man's way of getting a foot in the Void Which Binds' front door. Aenea knew that. You should have too.

Alone with the Morlocks, thought Silenus. But not even Morlocks for company in the end. Only my muse. There

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature

Was I a swordsman then? sends Johnny. Or a poet? [Yes There is never one without the other]

Well, nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity, I always say.

Have you always used a pen?" "No," I said, "only when I want to write something worth reading.

Poco después del enorme éxito de La mujer de blanco, se me preguntó cuál era el secreto de mi éxito; yo, modestamente, le dije a mi interlocutor: 1. Busca una idea central. 2. Idea unos personajes. 3. Deja que los personajes desarrollen los incidentes. 4. Empieza la historia por el principio.

Si un escritor se pone muy enfermo, todo se detiene. Si se muere, su negocio se acaba para siempre. En este sentido, la carrera de un escritor popular se parece más a la de un famoso actor, pero hasta el actor más famoso tiene un suplente. Un escritor no. Nadie puede sustituirle. Su voz personal lo es todo. Y esto es especialmente cierto en el caso de una escritor popular que ya está en proceso de ser publicado por entregas en una revista de tirada nacional.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.

But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes. Thus

are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and

It isn't hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time was my own.

If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters." The

Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

there's still room for writing that holds out some hope for humanity.

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

dreams are all that separates us from the machines

Worry is a misuse of the imagination.