Quotes About Creativity

had my books been any worse I would not have been invited to Hollywood and if they had been any better I would not have come.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

But show business has always been like that - any kind of show business. If these people didn't live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn't ride them too hard—well, they wouldn't be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest...a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.

Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

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." ? Raymond Chandler

Intentan ser honestos, pero la honestidad es un arte. El mal escritor es deshonesto sin saberlo, y el escritor más o menos bueno puede que sea deshonesto porque no sabe sobre qué ser honesto.

When it's good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mishmash.

The only salvation for a writer is to write. If there is anything good in him, it will come out.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her . . . that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

I've found that there are only two kinds [of slang] that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passé before it gets into print.

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 the tricks and has nothing to say.

A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who

Now go. An actor should know when to leave the stage, a poet when the lay is finished, and a bard when it is time to put aside the lute.

You see, there are few objective limits. What they teach you is useful, but never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

C'est en écrivant qu'on devient écriveron