Quotes About Creativity

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 colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines.

The terrible thing about public school is they take young children who are natural poets and storytellers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk "about it".

Ninety percent of writing is about listening.

You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination

If you missed the mouse today, you'll get it tomorrow. You never leave who you are. If you are a writer when writing, you are also a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing, too.

When you draw and pay attention to what is, it's a form of being present. This inspires the mind, makes it happy, and the heart wants to express more.

We learn writing by doing it.

The ability to put something down—to tell how you feel about an old husband, an old shoe, or the memory of a cheese sandwich on a gray morning in Miami—that moment you can finally align how you feel inside with the words you write; at that moment you are free because you are not fighting those things inside. You have accepted them, become one with them.

But what if you are already sixty, seventy years old, eighty, ninety? Let the thunder roll. You've got something to say. You are alive and you don't know for how long. (None of us really knows for how long.) No matter your age there is a sense of urgency, to make life immediate and relevant.

Walking home from work that night, I stopped in the Centicore Bookstore on State Street and wandered up and down the aisles. I saw a thin volume of poetry entitled Fruits and Vegetables by Erica Jong. (Jong had not come out with her novel Fear of Flying yet and was still unknown.) The first poem I opened to in the book was about cooking an eggplant!

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life. If you receive instructions on how to set a broken bone in your ankle, you can't use those same instructions to fill a cavity in your teeth.

okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another. Also, it is easy to carry. (I often buy notebook-size purses.) Garfield, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars. I use notebooks with funny covers. They come out fresh in September when school starts. They are a quarter more than the plain spirals, but I like them.

I have found that when I am writing something emotional, I must write it the first time directly with hand on paper. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words, your voice.

Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.

First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.

Writing is the act of discovery.

Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.