Quotes About Creativity

Tatterfell sews on cunning cuffs made from the scales of pinecones around the edges of frayed sleeves. Small tears in skirts are stitched over with embroidery in the shape of leaves and pomegranates and- on one- a cavorting fox. She has stitched dozens of leather slippers for me. I will be expected to dance so fiercely that I wear through a pair every night.

I like playing pretend with you.

Brambleweft starts to sketch- billowing skirts and cunning little capes, corsets stitched with fanciful creatures. Butterflies alighting along arms and in elaborate headpieces. I am charmed at the alien vision of myself- my corset will have two golden beetles stitched in what looks like a breastplate, with Madoc's moon crest and elaborate swirls of shining thread continuing down my front, and tiny sheer drop sleeves of more gold.

She's good at picking out clothes to send a certain message- even if the message of her drawings appears to be "stay away from me or I will chop off your head"...

I pass trays of spun-sugar animals, little acorn cups filled with wine, enormous sculptures of horn, and a stall where a bent-backed woman takes a brush and draws charms on the soles of shoes. It takes some wandering, but I finally find a collection of sculpted leather masks. They are pinned to a wall and cunningly shaped like the faces of strange animals or laughing goblins or boorish mortals, painted gold and green and every other colour imaginable.

He made me into a story, and now I am going to make a story out of someone else

If I can't find a good enough story I make one.

He said that all the story had gone out of me.

If I can't find a good enough story, I make one.

I am in a gown of deep forest green with crow feathers covering the shoulders and sleeves, while Cardan wears a doublet ornamented with bright beetle wings.

Nicasia saunters over to where the smith is sitting. She wears a dress of purple that is peacock blue when it catches the light. Her hair is woven in to a braid that circles her head, and at her brow is a chain from which dangle dozens upon dozens of beads in sparkling purples and blues and amber.

He made me into a story, and I am going to make a story out of someone else.

And let's debunk one bit of writer myth while we're here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats. These are all affectations, and smack of dilettantism. Real writers, and real artists, finish books and move on to the next project.

Every writer has something to say, but those writers whose works endure have dared to say something about the things that frighten them, confuse them, challenge them, and occasionally delight them.

Write with joy

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

Just make sure the unknown is a place you the writer understand. If you're going to write, you have to love. ... You have to fall on your face, swim against the tide, make terrible mistakes, and pay the price; you have to tune in, turn on, drop out, drop back in, fight, cry, lose, win. ... Above all, don't get too comfortable. Go out there and get your heart broken. You won't be able to write until you do.

Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.

I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place.

I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.