Writing and Creativity

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2010-03-07

“It’s not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.” – Jeff Melvoin

“An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.” – W. Somerset Maugham

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” – Virginia Woolf

“You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.” – Hugh Macleod

“You’ve got to love libraries. You’ve got to love books. You’ve got to love poetry. You’ve got to love  everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.” ~ Ray Bradbury

“You must not come lightly to the blank page.” – Stephen King

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”  – Hector Berlioz

“Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.” – John Keats

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.” – Salman Rushdie

“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” ~ Paul Tilich

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.” – John Ciardi

“Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.” ~ Anne Michaels

“See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.” ~ Real Live Preacher

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~ Anton Chekhov

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.” – Dee Hock

“Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.” – John Witherspoon

“In the absences of a decent time machine, fiction remains the most sturdy vehicle for visiting other eras.” ~ Tom Nolan

“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” – Piet Mondrian

“Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.” – Samuel Johnson

“There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.” -

“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”  – Pablo Picasso

2009-11-24

“I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.” – Ben Shahn

“Charge less, but charge. Otherwise, you will not be taken seriously, and you do your fellow artists no favours if you undercut the market.” -  Elizabeth Aston

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”  – Samuel Johnson

“Painting in watercolor is like walking a tight-rope; one must achieve a perfect balance between what the paint wants to do and what the artist wants to do, or all is lost.” – Mary C. Taylor

“We all need to have a creative outlet – a window, a space – so we don’t lose track of ourselves.” – Norman Fischer

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams

“Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”  – Jules Renard

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”  – Dorothy L. Sayers

“There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle – to do nothing at all.” – Sydney Smith

“Art has never been made while thinking of art.” – Niko Stumpo

“Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it’s primal. Wanting to change the world is not a noble calling, it’s a primal calling.” – Hugh Macleod

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso

“Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one’s chosen form.” – Stephen Nachmanovitch

“When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” – Anatole France

“If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it – the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.” – Ann Radcliffe

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” – unknown

“Nothing else exists when art does.” – Michael Patrick King

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” – Edwin Schlossberg

“Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.” – Thomas Berger

“During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.” – Fritjof Capra

“The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.” – Hugh Macleod

“I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.”  – Beryl Pfizer

“I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning , or destroyed it altogether.”  – Alfred North Whitehead

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.” – David Sedaris

“The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.”  – William Faulkner

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau

“It’s like your batteries get low, and you need to charge them on someone else’s story.” – Margaret Cho

“Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.” – Aprocrypha

“You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.” – Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.” – Jules Renard

“The pages are still blank, but there is a
miraculous feeling of the words being there,
written in invisible ink and clamoring
to become visible.” ~ Vladimir Nabakov

“It’s not about the writing. It’s about the feelings behind the words.” ~ Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” ~ unknown

“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.” – Edward Gibbon

“Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.” – Hesketh Pearson

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”- John Cleese

“One must also accept that one has ‘uncreative’ moments. The more honestly one can accept that, the quicker these moments will pass.” ~ Etty Hillesum

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair, the sense that you can never completely put on the page what is in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” ~ Stephen King

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” – Stephen King

“The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.” ~ Louis I Kahn

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” – Stephen King

2009-03-05

“The novelist is neither a historian nor prophet; he is an explorer of existence” ~ Milan Kundera