Quotes About Creativity

They're human beings, and the two things humans make are tools…and mistakes. But sometimes we get stuff right, too, and there are some really good models out there

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.

Although there can be fast improvements all over a book, it won't gel into a single cohesive life right away. Keep going, keep faith, because it can follow the reductive dynamic of a slow meat stock. You boil it down for fifty hours, and, sure, it distils mathematically, you can see it reducing and growing richer hour by hour. But flavour and texture don't gel until the last ten minutes. Always simmer your work until then.

When inspiration comes life is lived in the moment and peace descends. When inspiration leaves thoughts turn to violently killing time

If Life Gives You Lemons, Make a Molotov Cocktail

But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

I'll sit in the park and feed the pigeons for a while.' We don't have pigeons.' Then I'll feed the pterodactyls.

Lies hurt people; imagination makes life more fun.

at it's best fiction is medicine.

If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos. Or maybe I'm just a bullshit artist.

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote.

Ozzie Boone...insists that I keep the tone light in these biographical manuscripts. He believes that pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative. Ozzie counsels me that melancholy is a self-indulgent form of sorrow. By writing in an unrelievedly dark mode, he warns, the writer risks culturing darkness in his heart, becoming the very thing that he decries.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Do you see the invisible spirals on the margins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives.

The man told Henry that the only native talent needed to play music well was joy.

As soon as I got close to starting anything, I was beset by questions and hesitations. What I was about to do was so important, so significant, that it always required further consideration. My spontaneity would fizzle. I would put off my oeuvre for another day. Tomorrow at eight thirty I would start, for sure. Meanwhile, in joyful anticipation of this, I would go for a walk and then read.

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.

Sarà per via dell'Antrios, sarà stato l'acquisto dell'Antrios?... No... Il male viene da molto più lontano... Viene dal giorno in cui hai usato, senza un briciolo di ironia, il termine decostruzione, riferendoti a un oggetto d'arte. E non è stato il termine decostruzione a irritarmi, ma la gravità con cui l'hai pronunciato. Lo hai detto, amico mio, con solennità, con convinzione, senza la minima ironia: decostruzione .