Quotes About Creativity

He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. "The Theory of Ambition," an essay: JEAN-MARIE HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES

A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don't have it, at least the King of France doesn't either.

You have no right to assume that you'll be able to write because you could write yesterday.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

as a writer] you take up a life in your imagination, in which you can live all the other parts of yourself that you didn't become. And you can live in all the eras; the fact that you happened to be born in a certain place, in a certain dictate - the imagination doesn't accept these limitations.

Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out.

Metaphors are good,' he said. 'I like metaphors. Metaphors don't kill people.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?" - "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough." - Hilary Mantel

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly under-populated world from a child's point of view. His mother and his nurse were for long periods the only people he saw, in general the one unchanging element in a peripatetic existence.

Writing. Love is writing.

The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.

I'm undaunted in my quest to amuse myself by constantly changing my hair.

In a way, the goal of all writing projects should be to "get the hell out." You don't simply want to finish; you want to finish as quickly and easily as possible (without undue stress or pressure, of course) so that you can move on to the next project—or, the rest of your life.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

The dull-hued turkey apes the gait Of lordly peacock, richly plumed; And thus the poetaster shows When he would fain his verse recite.

Man may be considered as a superior species of animal who produces philosophies and poems in about the same way a silkworm produces their cocoons and bees their hives.