Quotes About Creativity

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.

As far as how I create games, I'm just reflecting what I feel, the things I have in my mind. I put those out there. Some of the things that I'm going through, the things that surround me, might be reflected there. But for me, it's a natural process. I just reflect what I feel into the game.

I think it is important to surround myself with artists who share the same goals and aspirations. This way, I am constantly encouraged to sharpen my craft and challenge myself.

Here's a simple truth: When you surround a good idea with brilliant people, it changes. No matter how much you plan, great ideas have a mind of their own.

Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

La chose dont je parle ici a une parenté avec le style, mais ne se ramène pas au seul style. C'est la griffe particulière et reconnaissable entre toutes qu'un écrivain appose à tout ce qu'il écrit. Ce n'est pas le talent. Le talent, ça court les rues. Mais un écrivain qui a une façon spéciale de voir les choses et qui donne une forme artistique à cette manière de voir est un écrivain qui a des chances de durer.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best for writing fiction.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

The more you reason the less you create.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is ever happy anywhere.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.