Quotes About Creativity

Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. ...... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

The Arquitectonica office, which produced the celebrated glass condominium on Brickell Avenue with the fifty-foot cube cut from its center, the frequently photographed "sky patio" in which there floated a palm tree, a Jacuzzi, and a lipstick-red spiral staircase, accompanied its elevations with crayon sketches, all moons and starry skies and airborne maidens, as in a Chagall.

In a time of disaster you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage.

Or was it even a dream? Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.

At nineteen I had wanted to write. At forty I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and "creative" in the human spirit.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.

Competing to be the best feeds on imitation. Competing to be unique thrives on innovation.

That's all right. We may say what we daren't write. "And sing what is too foolish to say

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

What is a writer of fiction but a liar with a licence?

Most problems can be solved through cake.

Anything that can be dreamed is true.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

C'è un fascino indescrivibile nel maneggiare anonimi blocchi di copertura grezza, nel grattugiarli a mano nei grandi paioli di ceramica - non uso mai il miscelatore elettrico - e dopo nel sciogliere, mescolare, provare ogni mossa accurata con il termometro per lo zucchero fino a quando si raggiunge la giusta gradazione di calore per ottenere la trasformazione.

My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity.

If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string.