Quotes About Creativity

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences freshly and with the appearance of reality – This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery

You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper-diet!

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian