Quotes About Creativity

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination

if one writes one can do nothing else.

He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.

All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse.

Opinion is the enemy of the artist because it arms his uninspired moment against his inspiration.

I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician, and the artist.

He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow-bone. (A Prayer For Old Age)

Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war, lovers of life, Impulsive men that look for happiness And sing when they have found it.

Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.

To me the supreme aim (of "arranging" one's ideas and writing poetry) is an act of faith and reason to make one rejoice in the midst of tragedy.

A line will take us hours may be; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.

The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.