1,443 quotes found
“Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of...”
“Dissatisfaction with status quo is the psychology behind creative disruptions.”
“It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes to close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in -at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in iso...”
“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, s...”
“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”
“Whos to say what a literary life is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you dont need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. S...”
“A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichs: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichs g...”
“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
“You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and I knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Becau...”
“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.”
“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.”
“Arrogance kills creativity.”
“The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objectiv...”
“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”
“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”
“Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let every...”
“No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. Weve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.”
“This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers dont. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approve...”
“If the writer were more like a reader, hed be a reader, not a writer. Its as uncomplicated as that.”
“The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.”
