Quotes About Creativity

The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!

I will write my name in fire red.

The really important difficulty is the place, room, cave, cabin to write in. – Jean Rhys

If I could choose I would rather be happy than write.

Music begins where the possibilities of language end

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue had never been erected in honor of a critic

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue set up in honour of a critic.

Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

Only a fool tries to reconstruct a bunch of grapes from a bottle of wine.

There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.