Quotes About Creativity

Damn it all! What rhymes with rhythm?

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

uncorny, human sized drama

Force yourself through the work, force the skills to comes; that's the hardest phase; I feel like your problem is that you're trying to judge all things in abstract before you do them. That is your tragic mistake.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn't at all easy to write clear, declarative prose—transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work—while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse.

A writer […] is poor in any country; he is only rich in spirit and in the satisfaction of having concluded an intellectual feat.

Who needs a suitcase? The notebooks are burnt.

It was at 25, not 15, that I began to write. Yes, there were attempts before, writing attempts, but they were the mere scribbling of a child who through no fault of her own knew only half an alphabet. Now, in my 27th year, it is appetite I have, and abundance to garner. I can make up for lost time—and time is what I have to seek some truths and pull together some lost pieces. It's okay. I'll do it. I'll make up those years.

Mine your words as if digging for diamonds and gold.

What would I do with billions? I don't need it. Would it make me a better artist?

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.

I so want to give him my notebook--I want to be a real person--he should read my book--I work for him, I cook for him, I'm Doris--Doris isn't just some piece of dirt. I don't want to be innocent, I want to be the real Doris here and not that silly civilized product of the Green Moss's imagination.

If writers were good business men, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

All good song-writers have no more than half a dozen good tunes in their systems, and if they have that many, they are liberally blessed.

Brahms writes music. I just write songs.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind it is a way of engaging reality.