Quotes About Creativity

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.

It's a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

fiction can't be written to comply with winning arguments.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Everybody has a talent, in some form. There isn't anyone on earth who doesn't have something of value to offer.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do something. 20

I can't rid myself of the need to do "something," to make "something," to feel that this new expanse of time hasn't been "wasted.

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing… This is my "theory", and I maintain it's sentimental - at all events it isn't Flaubert's. How can he fag himself to write "Un Coeur Simple"?

If these are 'talents' – the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation – what kind of a thing is 'talent'? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away - as it is at the moment - seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it's something to do. [...] Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it's something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It's something to do, isn't it? Fills the time.

Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...