Quotes About Creativity

All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.

We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.

Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write. But no. I always surprise myself.

Some of the best ideas I get seem to happen when I'm doing mindless manual labor or exercise. I'm not sure how that happens, but it leaves me free for remarkable ideas to occur.

I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Out of silence I begin to hear the voices of characters whispering snippets of a story to me.

Write as much as you can. As fast as you can. Finish your shit. Hit your deadlines. Try very hard not to suck.

Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don't want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.

Creativity needs time. We're all dying. Fuck stagnation. High-five creation.

Writers are made--forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities--over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same as the writer you become.

Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs.

Use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of a sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage.

once, if you told people you were self-published, they'd look at you like you were a smelly old jobless hobo just come off a dusty boxcar with soupcan shoes and a hat made from a coyote skull.

Don't ever feel reluctant to make contributions,they might have said it all,but they can't say it exactly the way you would.

I think it's really cool to embrace the pain of something that may have hurt you and be able to express it through music.

I am reminded, now, of Leonardo's advice to painters: You should fix your eyes, he says, on certain walls stained with damp. You will see in these the likenesses of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, extensive plains; and you will see there battles and strange figures engaged in violent actions. For in such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of church bells, in whose reverberations you may find every word imaginable.

I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.

No man was ever great without a touch of divine afflatus.

Han was thinking he was just as likely to shoot flames from his rear end.

Dans la stupidité il est un sérieux qui, mieux orienté, pourrait multiplier la somme des chefs-d'oeuvre.

Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.

Para um escritor, o progresso em direcção ao desprendimento e à libertação é um desastre sem precedentes: ele, mais do que ninguém, precisa dos seus defeitos: se triunfa sobre eles, está perdido. Ele que se abstenha portanto de se tornar melhor, pois, se o conseguir, arrepender-se-à amargamente.