Quotes About Creativity

She hadn't bothered to go to bed, since Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche, scones, cinnamon rolls, and- Tuesdays only- a coffee cake rich with cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla, and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life).

Tossing the chalk thoughtfully for a moment, I decided what to do. I wrote 'The cat sat on the mat' once in copperplate English, then translated into Latin, then French and finally, for good measure, in Italian.

We don't always want to read about everyday things – and that silly stuff is so much fun to parody.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.

Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.

There's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.

El arte siempre tiene al tiempo de su parte

They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.

Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.

the novel has almost as many forms as there are forms of love and sex.

Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamed for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

Do not imagine that art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket