Creativity Quotes - Page 3

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

Create a guidebook of creative dreams

You can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others.

Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Identifying Your Dream

Some people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don't keep space in your head for writing, you won't write even if you have the time.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!

Arrogance kills creativity.

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.