Quotes About Creativity

Stories. They're everywhere...You never know where they start and you certainly don't know where they'll end. If they ever DO end. (Nevermore)

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

I have stopped painting. I stand in front of the easel, brush in hand, but my mind is blank. It is as if I have been struck by a strange kind of blindness.

understanding and effectively countering the antagonists' methods through creative means

The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one's own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound.

Every story has another story inside, but you don't usually get to read the inside one. It's deleted or torn up or maybe filed away before the story becomes a book ...

Look! Look!" Jimble shouted. He raised both hands overhead, even though only one of them was glowing blue, and spoke in a gravelly roar. "I AM THE BLUE-HANDED BEASTER. KNEEL BEFORE ME OR DIE!" "Oh, for quake's sake," Raffa said, but he couldn't help laughing. "At least we know it works," Garith said.

When you're living through an experience, it's hard to imagine yourself outside it. But when you revisit it in a Write, you see yourself in a fuller context, which gives you information you didn't have before

It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.

What was hard was discovering the true life of the poem inside its technical scaffolding.

She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head

Edith would always believe art was for everyone, whether rich or poor, educated or not.

When a peculiar fact or well-stated bit of information triggers a poem, most of what I'll need is there where I stumbled on it. If questions arise later (moons of Jupiter, a three-syllable squid), Google is awfully handy of course.

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.

When I asked for her best motivational tip, she shared a single sentence she uses with her employees. Whenever she assigns a project, she says, "Make it as awesome as you want.

I don't abandon stories once I've started working on them. Once I sit down and start a story, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up on it. But I do reject most of the ideas for stories that I come up with.

In terms of style, too, I think I've been working with a somewhat limited -- although intentionally limited -- set of tools. So I'm attempting to be a bit looser as I start stories off. To digress. To make interesting mistakes.

Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.

I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.

It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.

I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake.