Quotes About Creativity

I wish you wouldn't say the first thing that comes into your head, Ludo. There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.

Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn't hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.

There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

The subject of food is like Chopsticks: almost anyone can improvise on it.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices." [ Ten rules for writing fiction ( The Guardian , 20 February 2010)]

Write what I know, who wants to read that? If only our apartment was haunted or I was the tiniest bit possessed by the devil.

All my life, I'd thought of having kids with the seriousness that I'd thought of taking a ceramics class. When I finally took one and came home with three beautifully glazed but warped bowls, my husband said: "You're not going to turn into a lady who makes pots, are you?" I was not. I kept the bowls and display them proudly—one holds fruit, one batteries, one loose change—but I had no interest in making anything else.

A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image....

There are no rules. That is how art is born.

Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: 'So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

Memo: do not drink coffee. It makes me uselessly nervy, even trembly, and engenders baseless optimism about my powers of creation.

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork — reading, writing, thinking — can.

If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive, I believe half your single girl battle is over.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

My mind is the pendant, creativity is the chain

Literature is my Utopia

Since I'm inarticulate, I express myself with images.

Women need time and space to play - particularly when we work so hard