Quotes About Creativity

She is practicing because she knows there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who's going to read it, what they're going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

I have been writing all my life. Growing up, I wrote in soft-covered journals, in spiral-bound notebooks, in diaries with locks and keys. I wrote love letters and lies, stories and missives. When I wasn't writing, I was reading. And when I wasn't writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere-I was sure of it-and writing was what took me there.

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.

Write the words The FIve Senses on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

I couldn't write. I grew tense. I was strangled by my own ego, by my petty desire for what I perceived to be the literary brass ring. I was missing the point, of course. The reward is in the doing.

If I'm not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.

You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

I was in the middle of my second novel and struggling. Instead of engagement, I felt a nagging worry. Had I lost my way? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn—but where? One afternoon, I met a friend of mine, a poet and novelist, for coffee. "I feel like I'm in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there's no land in sight," I told him. He took a sip of his drink and peered at me over his glasses. "Yeah," he said. "And you're building the boat.

She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

A writer afraid of her own subject- whatever it might be- is a frozen creature, trapped in the inessential. Diminished.

Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance - allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession - isn't exclusive to writing.

Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Failed recipes are never the problem. Failing to maintain or re-create them is.

creativity is not an easy equation. And there is no direct line. You are not born with it, and you cannot learn it. It is a combination of dedication, practice, study, passion, and desire all coming together at one time.

We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, "In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.

A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.

In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5