Creativity And Writing Quotes

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it. ~ Neil Gaiman

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. ~ Jane Yolen

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. ~ Anne McCaffrey

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. ~ Truman Capote

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up. ~ Nancy Kress

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Writers are always selling somebody out. ~ Joan Didion

Suit the action to the word, the
Word to the action. ~ William Shakespeare

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. ~ Russell Baker

But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.
Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers ... "
Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words. ~ Frances Hardinge

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit. ~ Gary Hume

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK. ~ Stephen King

In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely. ~ Michael Arndt

I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone. ~ Dawn French

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge. ~ Jeffery Deaver

The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters. ~ William Shenstone

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. ~ Roger Ebert

And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it. ~ Stephenie Meyer

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe. ~ Neil Gaiman

For me, form is something I locate in the process of writing the poems. What I mean is, I start scribbling, and then try to form the poem - on a typewriter or on my computer - and, by trial and error, try to find the right shape. I just try to keep forming the poem in different ways until it feels right to me. ~ Matthew Zapruder

Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind. ~ James Arthur

I've done a lot of collaboration over the years, but right now I'm enjoying writing by myself and just being me again for a while. ~ Delta Goodrem

Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death. ~ John Aldridge

Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real? ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation. ~ Sidney Lanier

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing. ~ Marguerite Young

In terms of sheer writing I might have done most of my work by 11. If you get up at 6:30 or 7 you can get a huge amount done by 11 and have the rest of the day off if you want to, though I have to check my accumulating e-mails. No one ever sends me horrible e-mails. Although some of my books are supposed to be hated, no one ever tells me. ~ Melvin Burgess

When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process. ~ Lawrence Block

For the philosopher, language, thought, and passion are the same. Ideas are personal to a philosopher; they express their human passion and articulate their novel ideas in language. Ideas are more than mere concepts, trifles that the philosophical mind toys with. Ideas provide both the structure and inner vitality that holds great thinkers' conceptual structure together. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans, and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged. ~ David Elkind

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting. ~ Daniel Clowes

I think inspiration is strongest when I find a balance between observation and participation. You can't write about what it means to dance by watching from the bleachers. ~ Chelsey Philpot

Deep play arises in such moments of intense enjoyment, focus, control, creativity, timelessness, confidence, volition, lack of self-awareness (hence transcendence) while doing things intrinsically worthwhile, rewarding for their own sake…It feels cleansing because when acting and thinking becomes one, there is no room left for other thoughts. ~ Diane Ackerman

A person can internalize their expressible thoughts and employ such ideas to modify human behavior. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant. ~ Oriana Fallaci

When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness. ~ Rachel Holmes

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It kept coming back to joy-- how could I live a life filled with it? And always, the answer that came back to me was "Write."

... I am here because of the indigenous people of this country, because of the enslaved people who were here before me, the young people of the civil rights movements who fought hard to get me to this moment.

My biggest responsibility is to recognize that I am part of the continuum, that I didn't just appear and start writing stuff down. I'm writing stuff down because Andre Lorde wrote stuff down, because James Baldwin wrote stuff down... and all the people who came before me -- set the stage for my work. I have to keep all of that in my heart as I move through the world, not only for the deep respect I have for them, but also for my own strength.

So my advice to other young writers: Read widely. Study other writers. Be thoughtful, Then go out and do the work of changing the form, finding your own voice, and saying what you need to say. Be fearless. And care.

The fact that young people continue to rise brings me such joy. They are where I look to find my hope.

-- "Continue to Rise: A Conversation with Jacqueline Woodson ~ Glory Edim