Quotes About Creativity

Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters.

I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer.

A desk is no place to think on the large scale.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writer are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the head of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

the way wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of imagination

botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.

often mild distraction that moves the imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration.

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

Sidda was tired of being vigilant, alert, sharp. She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girlness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words time management out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down into the uncharted beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.

the page swiftly. Sidda did not stop to correct herself, or to analyze why she was doing this. She simply glanced at the creekbank photo, sat at the cabin's table, and wrote from the heart. Oh, how Mama and the Ya-Yas laughed! I could hear them from the water where I played with

when we done went and ripped all the gold HIS monograms off the anniversary towels and writ SHITHEAD on them with magic markers.

about Alligator Girl with the head and shoulders of a girl, and the rest of her body pure alligator. Kind of like a mermaid, but mean. Oh! I am the world's best scary-story teller!

There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then had published a limerick.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence

Even when I write fiction, which I don't do too often, the fictional characters are familiar to me, like relatives I might have had in another life, and the setting is a place I know or have known. If I feel acquainted with the people and the landscape, I can enter this world and imagine what happens there and write it down. For me that world will always be some form of home.

It has taken me most of my writing life to understand that my "writing place" is here where I live, and that my "writing voice" is just my regular old voice, the one I use all the time. I am aware that the most important things in my life and my work are so close to me that I didn't even fully recognize them for a long time.

Another reason the "Are you still writing?" question is so hard to answer is that to ask me "Are you still writing?" is like asking "Are you still breathing?" Writing is the way I stay aware of being alive, the way I find out what I'm thinking, the way I understand the world.

Being shut down from our grief and rage deprives us of living our emotional and creative power. The practice of Swamping gives us that power back. We admit and embody the rupture. We roll around on the floor, rend our garments, throw our bodies into it. We experience and savor the full range of our feelings. If we want to live healthy lives as women, we need the space to grieve our asses off as often as we feel moved. Swamping gives us that opportunity.