Quotes About Creativity

An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and think it's wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as "suits."

That May, Einstein excitedly informed a friend, "In the tranquility of my sickness, I have laid a wonderful egg in the area of general relativity. Whether the bird that will hatch from it will be vital and long-lived only the gods know. So far I am blessing my sickness that has endowed me with it.

There are three things needed to be a great photographer. In this order. You and your keen eye, a great lens and a camera to make the shot.

We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius. This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative one. This is the human agenda.

He liked to say that what makes literature is "inventing truly from honestly acquired knowledge, so that what you make up is truer than what you might remember.

What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can't write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.

A study of Handel's operas and other dramatic works in addition to the undramatic and hence atypical Messiah will disclose a Handel largely unknown: a composer with a remarkable sense for dramatic human character. He saw men and women where others have seen only historical-mythical busts.

People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.

But it was hard for Poetry to stay angry very long. Nearly everything anybody said or did reminded him of a poem.

Revising while you generate text is like drinking decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Remember, you're allocating time to write, not finding time to write.

Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing.

Put your "inner writer" back on its leash and give it a chew toy.

Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend to them than inspiration

Writing books hurts like no other kind of writing.

Writing a book is like injecting anabolic steroids: it if doesn't kill you, it'll make you stronger and hairier.

Writing Well by William Zinsser

Binge writers are also binge readers and binge statisticians.

Even though I've written more than a hundred short stories I always think that I will never come up with another decent one. It's agony.