Quotes About Creativity

I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time.

My head was just circling things, so I had to pull out all those squirming thoughts and nail 'em to the paper.

And the and-then-I-woke-up-and-it-was-all-a-dream ending is simply inexcusable in fiction intended for an audience over the age of four.   The Golden Bottle will take two hours from the readers' life that they won't get back.

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one.

Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves.

I mean, who are you if you can't make it up? Especially people like you and me. Are we just supposed to stay the shitheads our parents and high schools sent out into the world, the ones our classmates assumed would do nothing with our lives?

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release?

Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who's lining up to see a sequel to Truth?

Everyone sees the same movie, but every reader experiences a different book, because reading involves you in hours of active, creative work, the characters, their movements and thoughts re-created in your own mind, their struggles and triumphs connecting to your own until a book becomes like a piece of music you've played—and sometimes mastered—over a period of days, or weeks.

And do you have opinions that John Locke didn't write first?

All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it.

If you want to make art, go get a job at the Loov-rah.

Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.

How much money do we pay for an education that will allow us to loop our necktie the same way each morning, to be given a regular parking spot to park our BMW every day, to buy a summer home so that even our vacations become routine? We are drilled in this unending sameness in high school, and only the insane and the inspired ever get past it.

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination

Part of what attracts us to artists is their otherness, their refusal to conform, their big middle finger stuck up in the face of Society, such that their very a- or immorality is what makes their art artistic rather than academic.

Unless we are very young or lifelong fools, we do not look to artists --- or their biographers --- for our role models. Their work is enough.

The decision to carve out time and attention to make your work is a breathtaking act of ego. You're saying, "I don't care what everyone else thinks I should be doing with my time. I know this is what I need to do." If

I sit in front of the notebook and feel like it's just too late for me. And that this book isn't working, nothing's working, everything feels like it's made of spiders." Those

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning, but for children play is serious learning." Mr. Rogers

Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one.

I'm just shitting rainbows all over the place.

I'd rather see the world from a different angle.