Writing Creative Process Quotes

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality. ~ Zbigniew Herbert

Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing. ~ Zooey Deschanel

10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don't want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don't.
Write every day.
Keep writing. ~ Brian Clark

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be. ~ Ayn Rand

Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being ... We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. ~ Steven Pressfield

We can actually accelerate the process through meditation, through the ability to find stillness through loving actions, through compassion and sharing, through understanding the nature of the creative process in the universe and having a sense of connection to it. So, that's conscious evolution. ~ Deepak Chopra

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. ~ Brenda Ueland

I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do. ~ George Clooney

These kids will make you cry, laugh ... They make you feel all kinds of emotions through their writings and they share a lot with me, as an instructor, that they might not normally share with other people because they are young artists and they need a platform for pulling that stuff out. ~ Clinton D. Powell

I think anything that's creative really takes my mind off whatever it is that I'm going through in my life. If you're going through heartbreak, and you can write a song, it's a wonderful win-win, because it takes your mind off the heartbreak, and you get to vent. ~ Nikki Sixx

Whether a carpenter makes a table, or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows his corn, or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation. This, however, holds true only for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the result of my work. In the modern work process of a clerk, the worker on the endless ~ Erich Fromm

Quote from Louise Penny a Canadian author. Wrote "How The Light Gets In" from an interview.
"Having started as a voracious reader (and I still am), I know that reading is as creative as writing. The writer suggests, creates a character, a setting, an atmosphere. But it's the reader who brings it alive. Walks with the characters, sees the world, smells the wood smoke, tastes the café au lait and feels the biting cold on the tender cheek ~ Louise Penny

Many of the cognitive enhancement drugs serve to increase focus and concentration. But 'letting your mind wander' is very often an important part of the creative process. ~ Jamais Cascio

The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? According to a theistic worldview, mind is primary. It is the fundamental creative force in the universe (whether God created the world quickly by fiat or slowly by a gradual process). Darwin reversed things. According to his theory, matter is the primary creative force, and mind emerged only very late in evolutionary history.10 ~ Nancy Pearcey

I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate. ~ Joy Harjo

For the artist who practises photography, capturing the image is learning how to sketch on some medium, but is only half the challenge; learning how to print is applying a subjective pallet to that sketch, and completes the creative process. ~ David Travis

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand. ~ Rita Dove

When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?' ~ Marya Hornbacher

My god, people are selling their work and people are reading it! The horror! That MFA programs have to advertise that they'll let you write YA or fantasy or what-have-you is just absurd, but we do, because the presumption is that they're closed to that sort of thing. You're offering an MFA in creative writing? Teach people how to write well, worry about that part, let the writers come up with the stories. ~ Tod Goldberg

As a director, you want to be really connected to every part of your set, from your actors all the way to your camera operators. Everybody is a part of the creative process, and if they feel like they're part of a team versus just being a tool, they're going to give you something special. ~ Eric Balfour

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing. ~ David Knopfler

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we're waiting to die. ~ Alan Moore

No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It's simply not worth it. This is not medical school. ~ Ann Patchett

Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil. ~ Herbert Simon

If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction ... Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person. ~ Richard Matheson

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing. ~ Steve Blank

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis. ~ Philip K. Dick

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely. ~ Josef Albers

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment. ~ Garry Disher

In the orientation of the creative, once you have consciously made the choice to be healthy and you are attracted to eating certain foods and following certain forms of exercise, you are involved in an organic process. The structural tendency of this organic process is for you to be attracted to those processes that will be particularly beneficial to your health. Those processes might include the usual, expected ones, such as health food and exercise, as well as unexpected ones. ~ Robert Fritz

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them. ~ Shelby Foote

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. ~ Nelson Algren

In my estimation, the best course in creative writing consists of voracious transglobal reading, disrespect for authority, not paying any attention to your teachers, experiencing everything you can to the point of mental and physical damage, and drinking. That's how most of the greats did it, and how it was meant to be done. ~ Eric Basso

The creative process isn't easy, even for chocolate-fountain people. It's more like a wobbly, drunken journey down a very steep and scary hill, not knowing if there's a sheer cliff at the end of it all. But it's worth the journey, I promise. ~ Felicia Day

We usually evaluate creative process in terms of how much feeling or thinking was behind the work or how well the work was done. Isn't there any other way of appreciating the process? What if the standard of excellence was how fully present the artist was during the process? ~ Kazuaki Tanahashi

Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet. ~ D. Antoinette Foy

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. ~ John Updike

Life is beautiful dream. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You will usually discover that the creative process itself is truly the most healing part of any art therapy experience. ~ Cathy A. Malchiodi