Quotes About Creativity

Great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things; that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

One man's thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man. who is inventing, and the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and common work of art.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression.

The first and absolute condition of the thing's ever becoming saleable is, that we shall make it without wanting to sell it; nay, rather with a determination not to sell it at any price, if once we get hold of it. Try to make your Art popular, cheap –

Why bother to go through life if you can't do interesting shit?

old musicians never die, they just decompose.

COOKING WAS a form of meditation

You didn't need it, because you're basically a painter, not a thief. But I'm basically a thief. That's what I do.

other story. The drawings have gotta

Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you're an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you're an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a living, which means that you don't have to lift heavy boxes or ask people if they want fries with that. Grow up and get back to work.

Never anger a sci-fi writer. These people destroy entire planets over lunch. Imagine what they'll do to you.

My characters were...rebelling against something...My own bad writing. I wouldn't do for my characters what they needed for me to do - be courageous enough in my writing to make them interesting.

God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?

I mean that you and I know that in this universe, God is a hack, he said. He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?

because she wasn't some fucking fictional character destined to do whatever some goddamn hack wanted her to do.

This novel took me rather longer than usual to write, for a number of reasons but one big one being simply that 2017 was a raging trash fire of a year, filled with horrible people trying to do horrible things and often succeeding. It's harder to bear down creatively when the world is burning.

I could not personally care less about whether JT Leroy turns out to be fictional or not. I find fictional people writing fiction no more or less objectionable than real people writing fiction, because it's fiction

Enzo showed a flair for words early and wrote his first story when he was seven, entitled The horrible sock that smelled bad and ate Pomona Falls except for my house, in which a large sock, mutated by its own horrible unwashed smell, started eating its way through the contents of an entire town and was thwarted only when the heroes Enzo and Magdy first punched it into submission and then threw it into a swimming pool filled with laundry soap.

And before that, there was, oh, I don't know, editors experiencing demonic possessions and devouring lagging midlist writers. It's always something.

Creativity eventually comes from the need not to have ourselves or other people eaten by leopards.

would be an unholy agglomeration of parts, a monstrous creature that would have sent its spiritual godmother Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley far around the bend.

Sarah Monette, Chris Roberson, Brandon Sanderson, K. J. Bishop and Steph Swainston

The three rules of writing: 1. It's Work. 2. It's Work. 3. Surprise! It's Work.

the assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.