Quotes About Creativity

I live. I write. I watch old movies. I read. I watch the sunset. I watch the moon rise.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them. I don't write autobiography.

My cradle was a shoe.

he suggested I pray to the Muse get down on my knees and pray right there in the corner and he said he meant it literally

The thing that makes poetry different from all other arts [is that] you're using language, which is what you use for everything else--telling lies and selling socks, advertising and conducting law. Whereas we don't write little concerti to each other, or paint pictures.

you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write — W.S. Merwin, from "Berryman," Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 (Copper Canyon Press; English Language edition October 1, 1996)

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

Let your creative juices flow and don't be afraid to take chances!

Don't be afraid to do something unconventional, to take a chance, to risk something.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

I don't often get a chance to have a frying pan in the show.

It is the highest form of culture and craftmanship in art to use local materials. That way you stand a chance of adding to culture. The other way you are in danger of merely imitating it.

The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It's a chance to get some really good words across.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

Don't be afraid to write crap - it makes the best fertilizer. The more you write the better your chances of growing something wonderful.

I have as much input to the blues; I just never got the chance, the opportunity or maybe the respect.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.