Quotes About Creativity

How to generate writing ideas, things to write about? Whatever's in front of you is a good beginning. Then move out into all streets. You can go anyplace. Tell me everything you know. Don't worry if what you know you can't prove or haven't studied.

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should

do all my original writing by hand. I have greater mobility: I can write on planes, with friends in cafés. Plus it feels more connected with my body; my hand moves with my arm and shoulder, which is connected to my chest and heart. All good writing comes from the body and is a physical experience.

Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things: read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don't think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and coloured sensation and keep your pen moving across the page.

Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don't worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north—just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.

Write in different places—for example, in a laundromat, and pick up on the rhythm of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafés. Write what is going on around you.

Why else are first thoughts so energizing? Because they have to do with freshness and inspiration. Inspiration means "breathing in." Breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself, and first thoughts are present. They are not a cover-up of what is actually happening or being felt. The present is imbued with tremendous energy. It is what is.

We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

this quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.

To read and to write is to be empowered. No shackle can ultimately hold you.

and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.

We're always thinking we should be writing no matter what else we might be doing. It's not fun. The life of an artist isn't easy. You're never free unless you are doing your art.

the artist and the alcoholic have parallel paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artist (if she is not also addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive.

Writing can be very lonely. Who's going to read it, who cares about it?

can't take myself too seriously when I open

Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.

Being an artist in our society makes us lonely. Everyone else leaves in the morning for work and structured jobs. Artists live outside that built in social system.

SIT DOWN WITH THE plan to write something you have always wanted to write but have never managed to get around to. This time, though, you are not timing yourself. You are sitting down with the determination to write it through, even if it takes all afternoon or night. Relax and ease into it. Promise yourself you'll burn through, put the real stuff down, and not get in your own way.

THE BASIC UNIT of writing practice is the timed exercise.

A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being

It's a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.

You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them.

it is Simone I want to visit in her cramped grave. To thank her for a single line in The Second Sex that I read in my midtwenties. It rang in my head like a bell, tolling the direction to my future. I paraphrase: In order to create, one must be deeply rooted in society. After reading that line I vowed to elbow my way in, to be heard. I knew women had been pushed to the margins.