Top 100 Quotes About Writing And Creativity
#1. He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.
Galt Niederhoffer
#3. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
Andrea Seigel
#4. Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.
Julia Cameron
#5. Books are a gateway to the extraordinary, a portal for the unfettered imagination and limitless creativity.
Diana Jane Heath
#6. Creativity. Taking something enormously strange and somehow making it strangely familiar.
Jim Lewis
#7. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.
H. Raven Rose
#8. All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.
Jimi Hendrix
#9. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.
Carl Sagan
#10. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#11. An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better.
Johnny Rich
#12. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#13. An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.
Julia Cameron
#14. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.
Fennel Hudson
#16. We are doing the most important possible work in the world when we open the door and reveal our creative nature.
It is the work of the Universe itself.
Jacob Nordby
#17. We make a home for ourselves, every time we work on something: actors, writers, singers, building these little nests in our gypsy souls, in place of the ones we so seldom seem to make in our own lives. And then suddenly it's over, and we have to start again.
Alan Brennert
#18. Mistress Creation keeps calling my name ... i long for her, and she, for me ... we will be reunited soon. In the interim, i bide my time dreaming of her, writing about her and stretching her across the vast landscape of my imagination. "Soon", i whisper to her, "Soon
Jaeda DeWalt
#20. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#21. If you're "one in a million", and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.
Jeff Goins
#22. And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!
David Almond
#23. People ask me how to start writing. I tell them that 'Creating Creates Creativity'. Put your notes and outline aside. Start with one anecdote or conversation, and that will lead to another and another. It's the steps, the path, not the final destination that drives the process or writing.
Dick Sederquist
#24. Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person ... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#25. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#26. 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.
Paul Valery
#27. Don't keep your Muse locked up in the closet. Set them free to dance across the page and what they create will be a masterpiece.
Michelle C. Hillstrom
#28. English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor.
Storm Princeholm
#29. Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers.
Don Roff
#30. I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.
L.M. Fields
#31. Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.
SARK
#32. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
Rollo May
#33. 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!
Charles Baudelaire
#34. I don't get writers block. I get writer has too many ideas and doesn't know which one to start next, block.
Tyler Hojberg
#35. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
#36. When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.
Sylvia Plath
#37. Writing and drawing are very therapeutic, but they are also an excellent manifestation tool. I teach my clients to draw what they want, or to write a story about it to bring the manifestation forward into the present.
Alice McCall
#38. Spiritual growth and creativity are two sides of the same coin.
Lada Ray
#39. When reading a book, one hopes it doesn't turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.
Chila Woychik
#40. Our schools have a doubly hard task, not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
Ken Robinson
#41. There's a magic to letting a story and its people unfold with witchcraft and late nights and walks in the woods. You don't lead a story. You follow it.
Kate Inglis
#42. Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#43. I am severely dyslexic, so I'm not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don't excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.
Raha Moharrak
#44. Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.
Stephen King
#45. As the story grew, it put down roots into the past and threw out unexpected branches .
J.R.R. Tolkien
#47. Writing is something you Do and not discuss. Talk is cheap, wishes are free and a fool is included with every purchase. So spend your time wisely.
Jaime Reed
#48. The process of creation can be unpredictable and, in some way, similar to love: the brightest waves of inspiration may sometimes occur in wrong timing, wrong places, or even with wrong people.
Sahara Sanders
#49. We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.
Rossana Condoleo
#50. True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.
Arthur Rimbaud
#51. If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.
Hugh MacLeod
#52. At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind's dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind's dungeons.
Avijeet Das
#53. Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.
Pat Conroy
#55. If I were to try and find a unifying emotion that kept me calm and focused while I was dancing or writing or solving a math problem, I think the one unifying thing about all those that keeps my interest is creativity.
Catherine Asaro
#56. The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.
Pat Conroy
#57. I've had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.
Chila Woychik
#58. I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.
Philippa Gregory
#59. When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled.
(Marti Melville)
Marti Melville
#60. (the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.
Sean O'Faolain
#61. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.
Julia Cameron
#62. We're not talking about your life. We're talking about your writing. Your imagination. Your creativity. And it's time you learned there's a big difference between your writing and your life. To do it right, your writing takes an incredible amount of work. Your life takes more.
Jennifer Echols
#63. Creativity is my addiction, and writing is my drug of choice!
AmBear Shellea
#64. Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death ... If we did not know we'd die, we'd wander around and sleep like cats.
Ray Bradbury
#65. Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists ... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.
Paul Laseau
#66. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#67. A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.
K.M. Soehnlein
#68. Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins.
Kamal Ravikant
#69. People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.
Lionel Suggs
#70. I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
Arthur Holitscher
#71. I'm back in these regions of fumbling dark uncertain creation, but it's my one and only world, and I'll do the best I can.
Jack Kerouac
#72. Writing is a form of art. Do not use New Times Roman or Arial because it's boring and hackneyed.
Natalya Vorobyova
#73. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
#74. Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.
Phil Cousineau
#75. Creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
Anne Lamott
#76. Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
Jessie Burton
#77. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
Julian Barnes
#78. When you imagine and clearly articulate your goals in writing, you access the creative energy of your right brain. Imagination and creativity allow you to find solutions to problems that were not previously available to you and give your left brain an opportunity to be receptive to new ideas.
Julie Connor
#79. I've always loved writing, and the impulse for me is storytelling. I don't sit down and think: 'What political message can I sell?' I love the creativity of it.
Randa Abdel-Fattah
#80. Give a hundred writers the same idea and you'll get a hundred different stories.
Joy Fielding
#81. He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.
Lauren Groff
#82. Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.
Christina Westover
#83. How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.
Ray Bradbury
#84. Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories - or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#85. For the length of time it takes to write a book, you need to believe that you're the only writer in existence; the only one who matters. You need to shut yourself away and allow the creativity to build up, not leak out through worry and comparisons and doubt.
Martin Cosgrove
#86. I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think discipline equals creativity.
Bret Easton Ellis
#87. I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
Laura Hillenbrand
#88. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
Steven Pressfield
#89. Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.
Fennel Hudson
#90. God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House")
Richard Matheson
#92. The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God ... or an artist and a writer.
Vera Nazarian
#93. I and my silences keep talking to each other.
Avijeet Das
#94. Writing a novel takes creativity. Publishing it takes courage
M.L. Kilian
#95. Contention murders creativity and stupidity is in enmity with freethinking.
Joel T. McGrath
#96. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Harold Bloom
#97. To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#98. The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we're plunging in for the best treats
Vicki Alayne Bradley
#99. Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
Brenda Ueland
#100. Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance ...
Edgar Degas
