Quotes About Creativity

Writers help summon people to a vision of human betterment...They create an awareness not just to things as they are, but as they ought to be." ~ Norman Cousins

No hay literatura femenina. Hay hombres y mujeres que escriben".

First you find out what you have , Dad would say. Then you figure out how to make it work for what you need, 'cause you don't get what you want. You get just what you have and no more.

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one's own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another's. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.

I am happy to see that more and more young people are once again taking up theatre.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

I don't like reading things that people say on the Internet because I know so much of it is not true. I don't want to waste my time worrying about what other people are thinking. I just want to focus on being able to do cool projects.

If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

But I can't go out with a guy who's written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that's still inside me.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It's all fear. If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams.

But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time.

It's good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What's the point? You'll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable.

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. 'Don't stop' I said. 'Your typing makes my brain work better.

I try to write something new. It's bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn't feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

It's a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I'll put this down on the page but it's not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.

No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they're writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It's when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.

Victor asks us to find the moments of heat in the writing we have done, has us circle and isolate those words, and with them we write a poem. We read them out loud. There's one about an ashtray, a sequined dress, flour on a kitchen floor. Victor says something about each one. The feeling in the room is beautiful, wide open.