Quotes About Creativity

soon the girls had Barty enthusiastically involved in a make-believe world far different from the one in which Heinlein's teenage lead owned an extraordinary alien pet with eight legs, the temperament of a kitten, and an appetite for everything from grizzly bears to Buicks.

Well I'm not in Adams and Steichen's league. I like to think my work is art, but few galleries represent photos anymore, not like there were when those guys were hot. The mystique is gone, you know. Every Joe and Jane with a smartphone thinks they're a genius photographer.

stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning.

Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine. You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind. She

As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.

However, as there is no end to the beauty that some can create, so there also is no end to the horrors that others

Jim Jamison, like Ed, loved music and art and history.

If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for the 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.

They were stories of things that had never happened and could never happen, but she told them with such quiet verve and conviction that we believed them and wanted to continue believing even after time robbed us of our sense of wonder.

AN ARTIST IS A MATHEMATICIAN WHO KNOWS THE FORMULAS OF THE SOUL

To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right.

As a man who felt that he had been born too late, Jeffy was often amazed at what passed for high art in this low age.

You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.

because real life was plotted like Tolkien on methamphetamine

the brain produced

His third never made the list, sold fifteen thousand copies, and was savaged by critics.

The island, purchased as the artist's retreat, in time became his sanctuary from ridicule and humiliation.

books were a way to lead another life, a way to be someone else entirely, to be anyone at all.

Maybe it's just that before anything came the word, and words are the roots of everything that our senses perceive. Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos.

A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

I don't believe in writer's block, writing well is very easy; it's writing horribly, the horrible work necessary to do to get to writing well, that is so difficult one may just not be willing to do it.

I love the way knitting brings people together.