All Quotes By Tag: Creativity

“Literature is painting, architecture, and music.”

“Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.”

“The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.”

“If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there’s no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.”

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”

“Art is the overflow of emotion into action.”

“It is said that you can’t write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can’t read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well…..problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.”

“What happens in my next chapter depends on whether I wake up feeling creative or murderous.”

“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.”

“You have to find the courage to live as you need to. There will always be those who want you to be ordinary, those who expect you to settle down. Your body can settle, but you have to let your mind soar, you have to hold onto the courage of your artistic convictions.”

“The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?”

“I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.”

“What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.”

“It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..”

“Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.”