Quotes About Creativity

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

The poets scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

Being pigeonholed is the death of all actors.

I am not opposed to doing a side project, like Death Cab for Cutie, where it's completely different from my own band.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

I wouldn't feel satisfied being on set every day doing a romantic comedy - I'd be bored to death.

Art is a protest against death.

The absolute worst thing a person can say about your pictures is, '"That's nice." It's the kiss of death.

Inertia is the death of creativity

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

The most enviable genius in literary history is the guy who invented alphabet soup: nobody knows who he is.

All of European literature springs from a fight.

So I said, and quickly reached for my glass so as to duck my disingenuous face and take a bitter drop of brandy on my tongue. But Lonoff had read my designing mind, all right; for when I came upon Babel's description of the Jewish writer as a man with autumn in his heart and spectacles on his nose, I had been inspired to add, "and blood in his penis," and had then recorded the words like a challenge—a flaming Dedalian formula to ignite my soul's smithy.

Around three A.M., I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the static of unelaborated thought.

This is what happens when you write books. There's not just something that drives you to find out everything—something begins putting everything in your path.

Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him.

I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there.

imaginación, y mi tarea en cuanto artista no consistía en desarrollar a mi imaginación, sino en contenerla, lo cual ya entonces me pareció imposible, porque todo era tan increíble que

Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind.