Quotes About Creativity

He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who's writing in his sleep.

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.

You know, it's not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

Aber das ist es nun mal, was wir tun: wir träumen weiter gegen den Strom und unsere Träume entschlüpfen uns fast so lebendig, wie wir sie heraufbeschwören können.

I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It's important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.

When you write screenplays that don't get made, you lose your sense of humor about the bad movies that do get made

The English teacher kept his fingers crossed about Exeter; if the boy was accepted, Mr. Leary hoped the school would be so rigorous that it might save young Baciagalupo from the more unsavory aspects of his imagination. At Exeter, maybe the mechanics of writing would be so thoroughly demanding and time-consuming that Danny would become a more intellectual writer. (Meaning what, exactly? Not quite such a creative one?)

Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean?

I just don't dare to make up everything, like you do." I don't make up everything, but when I use things that actually happened, I always change something; I try to make what happens not exactly true.

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.

Treading water, a little dog-paddling—it's a lot like writing a novel, Clark," the dump reader told his former student. "It feels like you're going a long way, because it's a lot of work, but you're basically covering old ground—you're hanging out in familiar territory.

Le romancier est comme un médecin qui ne s'occuperait que des incurables. Et nous sommes tous des incurables.

Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable

Escribió que la peor razón para que algo ocurriera en una novela era que hubiera ocurrido realmente. "¡Todo ha ocurrido realmente, alguna vez!", rabiaba. "La única razón para que algo ocurra es que es perfecto que ocurra en ese momento". -Dime cualquier cosa que te haya ocurrido a ti- dijo en cierta ocasión a una entrevistadora- y yo lo mejoraré. Puedo mostrar los detalles mejor que como ocurrieron.

There's a reason we're fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business," I try to tell her.

Imagining something is better than remembering something

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

They were William Blake's words, set to song

Autobiography just isn't good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn't big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.

No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.

no planning, Graff--that's the first thing. No mapping it out, no dates to get anywhere, no dates to get back. Just think of things! Think of mountains, say, or think of beaches. Think of rich widows and farm girls! Then just point to where you feel they'll be, and pick the roads the same way too--pick them for the curves and hills. That's the second thing--to pick roads that the beast will love.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness," Rilke had written.