Quotes About Creativity

the classes themselves, which were prim and undemanding, bored me in a way school never had before. . .So I passed the class hours slouched in the back rows, keeping an eye on the trees outside for signs of wind direction and strength, drawing page after page of surfboards and waves.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people...

Yes, did you hear what that woman said? . . . I think it's the artist is the only person who is really given the capability of being happy, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. Don't you think so? Don't you think so? . . .

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people . . .

What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.

You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work

I had no idea that no one else would do it.

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves

I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard.

But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human.

Aubrey Beardsley.

he appeared not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake).

Far more creativity, today, goes into marketing of products than into the products themselves

I'm allergic to Best Ofs, canon of all sorts, rankings, comparison. I love the bottomless Borgesian library.

I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans

But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.

subgenres are products of the writers' urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic

I remember the people I've heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I've heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth.