You are one thing only. You are a Divine Being. An all-powerful Creator. You are a Deity in jeans and a t-shirt, and within you dwells the infinite wisdom of the ages and the sacred...

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as...

Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going...

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving...

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)

Help me, Lord, in times when I am uninspired to see things differently.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.

you areso deliciousto my poetic side.

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re...

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: ‘My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, “The Cookiepants Hypotenuse.”‘ Or else they get...

Random thought fills the streambed, cascading with care and spilling over the flood plain until bifurcation forces it to arc and fork into a single, determined stream.

Whether we write lyrics or craft legislation, sell homes or teach classes, design spaces or open franchises, prayer is a critical part of the creative process. Don’t just brainstorm; praystorm.

We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.

Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created.

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa,...

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get...

Theater is the crucible where we can create the dynamics of life without suffering the flames of their combustion.

intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant...

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”(Casual Chance, 1964)

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.”[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January...

Remind me, Lord, of why I create things and that YOU … you are the best of artists, put these gifts in me to share with the world.

Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body...

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

She pours sugar on her life and drinks the artist’s marrow in the bone of her glass and she lives.

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.”(Interview, The...

For any creative thought to be contagious, it must first be worthy of a sneeze.

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or...

Write. Don’t talk about writing. Don’t tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don’t give me a bunch of ‘somedays’. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it...

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then...

I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an ‘idealistic’...

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason...

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits...

I just needed time alone with my own thoughtsGot treasures in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault

Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.

Creativity isn’t a switch that’s flicked on or off; it’s a way of seeing, engaging and responding to the world around you.

Creativity is as much about order against freedom; control versus rebellion; organisation against disorder as it is about straightforward imagination.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater,...

Years and years ago, I read a great interview with Jam and Lewis, the R&B producers, in which they described what it was like to be members of Prince’s band. They’d sit down, and Prince...

[T]he success of every novel — if it’s a novel of action — depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “What are my big scenes?” and then get...

You can’t force creatives into a box. If you try, they’ll no longer be creative. And no one will want your box.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter.

The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody...

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

We can’t turn our true selves off and on situationally and expect them to carry and sustain us. Rationing creativity results in bipolarism of the spirit. Our creativity is also our life force. When we...