Quotes About Creativity

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?

You won't understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.

many good liars have no imagination at all its which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

Keep away from the literal-minded folk, and ignore the scoffers.

As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that.

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

No literary work longer than a haiku is going to be entirely without faults.

We need to imagine as well as measure.

I'm working on another Lyra book right now – it's called The Book of Dust. "It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'.

The question authors get asked more than any other is Where do you get your ideas from? And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Besides, if you want to write something perfect, write a haiku. Anything longer is bound to have a few passages that don't work as well as they might.