Quotes About Creativity

Mrs. Astor had long held that artists of any ilk - painters, authors, actors and the like - merit no recognition unless safely dead, and that meeting them risks both needless mental fatigue and the possibility of social contamination.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

I feel like a little kid in a toy shop. All those books. I've always wanted to be a writer, but before I met Ms. Finney, Barbara, I was afraid to tell anyone. I think it's some kind of miracle that all we have to work with is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. And they turn into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, conversations, plays. It's just incredible to me.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

Imagination is conjunctive and unifying; the sour, habitual wars of the self are disjunctive and separating. When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

Because that's what fantasy is, isn't it?" he demanded. "Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!

Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

In Paris, you couldn't really turn around without seeing the result of lovers' bad decisions. An artist given to sexual excess was almost a cliché, but no one seemed to mind. As long as you were making something good or interesting or sensational, you could have as many lovers as you wanted and ruin them all.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

All her stories seemed to involve rowboats and ukuleles, full moons and campfires and grog. I was desperately jealous.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

What do you mean to do?' 'Make literary history, I guess.

I have so many schemes about writing – so much I want to see and feel and do.

I met the devil,' Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, 'and he doesn't give a damn about art.

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

Something was missing in my life—in me—and I thought writing could fill it or fix it, or cure me of myself.

playground studded with one of those

I want to write something, but I don't think I can without being emotional." "Just make a start. Begin anywhere." "It might be terrible." "It might be. That's not the worst thing." "No," I agreed. And it wasn't. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.

Obviously he'd seen my own failings in the pages, though I'd only meant to show him how clever my dialogue was, and how gaspingly well I'd described the sea.

Write, and do it now instead of capitalizing on your nice figure and your pretty hair. Stop being so charming." The sting of his words made me dizzy. My ears rang. "If I am charming it's your fault and Mother's." "You're just afraid to be lonely.