Quotes About Creativity

I would quit while you're ahead. Really. It's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you 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.

For nothing from my wit or will doth flow, Since all my words thy beauty doth endite, And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.

As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.

The arts are the best Time Machine we have. C. S. Lewis

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

The artist became a subcreator.

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

Tolkien, lucky man, had protected a realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes: The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his… Wisdom made him old and wary banishing his Lords of Faery

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.

and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world – this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.

iI you are a reader you are already half-way to being a writer -for you have a love of words and a pleasure from seeing them on a page.

Derrida s'intéressait moins au roman qu'à l'écriture, et ce qui l'a fasciné c'est le fait que j'ai fait de l'écriture un roman.

Personne ne peut me dire une richesse nouvelle

Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

A)rt is like bread, an essential ingredient for nourishing the soul.

Imagination is a form of seeing

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

You don't make art, you find it

Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

Inspiration exists but it must find you working.

We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realise the truth