Quotes About Creativity

William Goldman

Jelenka Harvey Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 215 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003*

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

Success, it seems to me, would be somewhat meaningless if the play were not a personal contribution. The author who creates only for audience consumption is only engaged in a financial enterprise.

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they're willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

His remarkable succession of inventions made him appear to possess almost magical powers, so that he was called "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The notion alternately amused and angered him. "Wizard?" he would say. "Pshaw. It's plain hard work that does it." Or, his much quoted statement: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Laziness, mental laziness in particular, tried his patience.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal.

The crazy game of pilling stones was also in you and your friends' marvelous innovation. And how really hard you would hit the phony big guy who you hated like anything.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

Art Nouveau was coil-envy.

There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.

Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.

Strictly speaking, she thought, this place was a cross between a forest and a jungle. "This is a jorest," she said to Hemi. "Yeah," he said. "No, it's a fungle." They grinned.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want, but to try to make readers want what I give.

In the streets of Un Lun Dun: a group of a girl, a half ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual but not very.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

What if most fiction is, at best, moderately important? What if it is so vague and culturally drivel-some, and so mediated by everything else once the culture industry extrudes it through a writer-shaped nozzle, that our stern declarations about subversive literature are, mostly, kind of adorable?