Quotes About Creativity

Don't you understand?" he would say, "You imagine the story better than I remember it.

The lie, of course, is more interesting.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don't know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

No one could have fathomed what a life he'd led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked. Seventeen, I told her. Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

If you don't feel you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then what you're doing probably isn't very vital. If you don't feel that you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you're not trying to tell enough.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.

the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.

What do you think I imagine making love to a vagina would be like? Maybe like having sex with a ballroom!

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.