Quotes About Creativity

Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.

Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

The Musicians of Bremen

Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.

But if we get education right... it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time … - Isis lecture, 2003

here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

When you write a story you're not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you're doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.

I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that - not I am a writer, but rather I write stories. If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

When I'm writing, I'm more conscious of the sound, actually, than the meaning. I know what the rhythm of the sentence is going to be before I know what the words are going to be in it.

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.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo en entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

Schools must take children to the theatre. This activity must be subsidised. Children should be able to join a youth theatre near where they live, and learn how to take part in every aspect of putting on a play. Places like that should be subsidised too. These things are not luxuries: they're essential to our wellbeing.

I can't do that anymore. That was just fancy. I was spinning tales out of the air, nothing more than that; there was nothing solid in them. Maybe Pan was right, and I haven't got a real imagination. I was bullshitting.

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. So

Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a "narcissist," but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated