Quotes About Creativity

Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time." He went on: "I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore. --New York Times, 18 Nov. 2012

I don't know anybody. I turn sentences around, and that's it.

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing. Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on.

If you don't know the fantasy life of a country, it's hard to write fiction about it.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is.

Scrivere ti trasforma in una persona che sbaglia sempre. La perversione che ti spinge a continuare è l'illusione che un giorno, forse, l'imbroccherai. Che cos'altro potrebbe farlo? Come per tutti i fenomeni patologici, non ti rovina completamente la vita.

You can store us like shoes or ship us like lettuce. The simpleton who invented the coffin was a poetic genius and a great wit.

Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while.

The world would be a sadder place without stories.

This is the real magic of fantasy fiction: it can feed souls and change lives.

The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

When I was little, Jamie and I used to watch movies every Seven-day, almost all morning long. Sometimes we would have friends over. We liked old movies best because we would make it a contest to see who could find the most mistakes. The obvious one was the "Earth-like planet." You don't get points for that one, it was too obvious. Jamie liked to say, "There are no Earth-like planets. There are only lazy writers.

Your motion is still denied, but I just want you to know I'm very impressed with your creativity.

This time it's our turn to have the good idea.

I can type very fast, sometimes even faster than I can think of what to type.

If artists, writers and musicians were not just a little delusional, they would all have office jobs.

Well, I think it's extraordinarily fun to write, and I look forward to it every day, but that doesn't mean I think it's easy. There's a difference between the two. It's fun in the way all worthwhile things are fun – there's difficulty attached to it. I think that a writer has to accept a certain amount of frustration. It's inherent in the task, and you have to simply persevere. It's part of the definition of the work.

None of us should wait to be told what to do, or how to do it. Micromanagement kills initiative, judgment and creativity.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.