Quotes About Creativity

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

Popular art is the dream of society it does not examine itself.

A word after a word after a word is power.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Like water leaking slowly through a dike to become a steady trickle or a flood, words and ideas inexorably elude the censor's grasp. (Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature)

The element of discovery is very important. I don't repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another.

though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own. And thus, believing, or, at least, hoping, that no Creature can, or will, Envy me for this World of mine, I remain, Noble Ladies, Your Humble Servant, M. Newcastle.

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.

she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men's flowers. 'These are other men's flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.

there's a difference between what happens to one in real life and what one can make real in art.

After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight.

Not an elegant tapestry but a serviceable quilt.

We're a rather dreary generation on the whole, aren't we? We don't create much beauty of our own, and our one idea seems to be to smash up everybody else's creations.

Margaret Frith

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores.

Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

The things we fear most in organisations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.

When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits." With all our different interests, we definitely can't allow ourselves to get stuck in that trap: We need to design a multifaceted life big enough to accommodate our Renaissance Souls.

Yet sometimes Renaissance Souls don't feel so lucky. Despite a long and proud history of Renaissance Souls who've negotiated treaties, invented revolutionary machines, written great novels, and led victorious armies, our culture often insists that we are defective.

Few pleasures are as basic and satisfying as hearing a good story-unless it's the pleasure of writing one.