Quotes About Creativity

You see, I'm – a writer, A man, who calls everything by its name, And steals the aroma from a living flower.

I paint with shapes.

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible.

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do - I think it is even what fiction is for.

Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

Your imagination needs o be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, to easily changed.

I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.

For the novelists in your life I have heard it said that it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to, and doesn't need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked for support, muster an enormous enthusiasm.

That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.

I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. The novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.

Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.

I begin my work at about nine or ten o'clock in the evening and continue until four or five in the morning. Night is a more quiet time to work. It aids thought.

I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.

It's not enough to be Hungarian, you must have talent too.

El proceso creativo frecuentemente conlleva algún dolor en el esfuerzo por lograr que una concepción dé frutos.