Quotes About Creativity

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Yoko Ono, quite simply, did things that John Lennon did not dare.

He had always loved to draw and paint, begging to be bought pencils, paint boxes, and paper rather than toys, spending hours wrapped up in worlds of his own creation.

I even, to my own amusement if no one else's, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

the Basil Spence Syndrome. When Coventry Cathedral was going up and in the public eye, he went through a lean period when he wasn't offered any jobs at all because people thought he wouldn't have time for anything else.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Nova shrugged, looking as if she had personally invented shrugging and hadn't quite sorted out the fine details yet.

What's your plan?" "There isn't one," said Hester. "I'm just making it up as I go along.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

That's impossible,' said Fever, Engineerishly.

The radio was playing "Easter Parade" and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas."… Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don't need that question answered.

"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Thus, with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite: Fool! said my muse to me, look in thy heart, and write.

For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.

One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It's well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They're only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that's where they're in charge - where they're God. Did you know that Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl until he was six years old?" I was not offended by Claudia's glib psychological theory. Like many glib psychological theories, it struck me as fundamentally correct.