Quotes About Creativity

I believe one thing powerfully- that the only creative thing our species has is the individual, lonely mind... The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle.

I come from a whole goddam family of inventors, said Will. We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries.

is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.

I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use. And I can't seem to do it.

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff.

A writer and his work is and should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone, trusting no one, loving no one. It's hard to justify such a life but that's the way it is if it is done well.

Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.

Il vino aggiunge maiuscole e asterischi a un buon racconto... a una storia vera.

I try to write what seems to me true. If it isn't true for other people, then it isn't good art. But I've only my own eyes to see with. I won't use the eyes of other people.

He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming—and, properly applied, that is all advertising is.

In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnett: I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process. Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. p xxxviii

And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it otherwise might have been.

Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

AÄŸz?nla söyleyemeyeceÄŸin bir ÅŸeyi, kaleme dayan?p yazmak neye yarar?

I also wonder what would have happened if Steinbeck had forsaken Le Morte d'Arthur and invented a world of his own. Free to follow his own course, he might have crafted a major work of fantasy. It's not as unlikely as it may seem. His first novel, Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History, was one of high adventure, with more fiction than history.

his writings derive from a basically romantic temperament)

You know, Mr. Trask, once I had a wife. I made her up just as you did, only mine had no life outside my mind. She was good company in my little room. I would talk and she would listen, and then she would talk, would tell me all the happenings of a woman's afternoon. She was very pretty and she made coquettish little jokes. But now I don't know whether I would listen to her. And I wouldn't want to make her sad or lonely. So there's my first plan gone.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Whatever men make, she says, what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.