Quotes About Creativity

We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade

Take a breath. Observe. Proceed. If you still feel fear about proceeding, choose to say, "Fuck it." "Fuck it" is a declaration of freedom. It announces to the world that nothing can hold you back, not even your fear. Although fear can be crippling at times, it can also be a powerful catalyst for positive change. We are all fearful. There is nothing wrong with it. Recast your fear. It can become a motivating factor. Use it to launch into a higher orbit of creativity.

But Urdda stood firm. 'Where do you come from, sir?' 'I come' - the littlee-man stalked towards her in a way that might have been menacing, had he been full-sized - 'from Smelly-bumhole Land. You may call me Mister Odiferous. Up through the arse of the world I come here, and when I'm finished I will squeeze myself back out it.

All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

A single pastime carried Olive through her early repatriation: given thread and fabric, she quickly remembered how to sew, and did so in a therapeutic frenzy.

Kultur und Todeswissen sind eng miteinander verflochten, wir wissen um die Kurzfristigkeit, um die Begrenztheit des Lebens. Das Gewahrwerden des eigenen Todes ist entscheidende Bedingung für die kulturelle Schöpferkraft. Kultur verspricht Dauer, Kultur schöpft Sinn, Kultur handelt mit Transzendenz. Ihr implizites Ziel ist es, das, was vorgegeben ist, zu überschreiten und ihm so Dauer zu verleihen.

friend. Then he had an idea...

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

Why not dream your own wonderful sequels? When you have finished a book, it can go on in your mind, the characters doing just what you want them to do.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. Clear back to "Don Quixote." I never decided to write in a "new way" at all. It's realism that's fairly new. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

When it comes to fantasy formations, it is therefore essential to distinguish between (1) unconscious fantasies that curb our existential options and (2) imaginative and creative fantasies that allow us to observe the world from novel angles. Lacan's assault on narcissistic fantasies is directed at the former, whereas his commentary on the poetic potentialities of language could be argued to relate to the latter.

One reason that Freud views creativity as a valuable antidote to symptoms—and let us recall that symptoms are, by definition, indicators of psychic inflexibility—is that he believes it to be an active means of mourning loss.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

Creativity facilitates the work of mourning.

It would be difficult to ignore the impression that there exists a connection of some sort between creativity and solitude, that creativity commonly involves a more or less prolonged retraction of psychic energies from the external world.