Quotes About Creativity

Ah, well. At least religion was responsible for some nice pictures, and that should count for something.

loud musical voices from the bottom floor of your brain that try to send you reeling along the path, no matter how urgent they have become in the rippling light of the moon.

Loneliness is an art form

anything that might be

She jotted this down in her ubiquitous notebook.

Someone once asked him why he didn't just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

What would it be like to tattoo a living, beating heart? Could it be done?

studio and the junkyards

Graffiti, Dimitri explained

Faulkner didn't put those

George Bernard Shaw which Annabel quoted so often: "Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.

pencil hadn't stopped scribbling

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

She wanted out of that decorating scheme.

Bubble-gum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the books spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks.

We stood silent. After a moment I said, Real Geniuses never think they're geniuses. Who says? Me. Because why? Because genius is nine-tenths perspiration. Haven't you ever heard that? As soon as you think you're a genius, you slack off. You think everything you do is so great and everything.

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

Great discoveries, whether of silk or gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.