Quotes About Creativity

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

We are fictioneers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure you've got a fabulously dark, twisted, and perhaps even deeply sick imagination. I'm not trying to devalue the dementedness of your imagination and do not mean to diminish your pride in it.

My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.

I'd always had an ear for beauty, and maybe I'd had an eye for it as well, but until that day, I'd not recognized that the truth in great music could be found also in great art, that the heart could be lifted and the mind sharpened equally by both.

If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself.

Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg.

Where does fiction end and reality begin?

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?

Art is the only answer to chaos and the void.

although we universally celebrate imagination, it is in fact a power that can uplift us and save us --- or as easily demean and destroy us. Mozart imagined great music. Hitler imagined death camps and built them.

There are other worlds to sing in.

And because we have been given thought, will, and imagination, albeit on a human scale, we too have this power to create.

art is long and critics are the insects of a day.

The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.

Then perhaps you shouldn't sleep. The imagination has terrifying power.

I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is.

pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

The trouble with the what-if game was that once you began to play it, you couldn't just quit whenever you wanted. From one what-if grew another.

There's such a thing as trying too hard, he told himself. It causes constipation of the mind. But such admonishments did no good. He was still as blocked as a pipe full of concrete.

improvisator.

This next one's by someone named Anatole France. 'To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.'

He said, "Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.