Quotes About Creativity

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel. (- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

This was such bad writing that it was good.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men. (Something About a Soldier (1940))

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop

The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy—the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

When I think of the good things still to be written I am glad, for there is no end to them, and I know I myself shall write some of them.

Singers are the happiest horses' asses.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Thou mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms!

William Shakespeare

Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head?

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name

William Shakespeare