Quotes About Creativity

Players and painted stage took all my love,And not those things that they were emblems of.

The fascination of what's difficultHas dried the sap out of my veins, and rentSpontaneous joy and natural contentOut of my heart.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mindAnd lost the old nonchalance of the hand;Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,We are but critics, or but half create.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with.

The friends that have it I do wrongWhen ever I remake a songShould know what issue is at stake,It is myself that I remake.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.

We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was a continual Warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers.

Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.

Let's not get so ecstatic we ignore the fiscal situation. As my agent so delicately pointed out, most novels--providing they get published--net the author about enough for a new typewriter ribbon and a quart of tequila in which to drown his sorrows when he receives his royalty statement. You will find precious few novelists listed in Dun and Bradstreet.

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.

It's the anarchy of povertydelights me.

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

Who shall say I am notthe happy genius of my household?

If they give you lined paper, write the other way.

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.