Quotes about Creativity

Writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

I've managed to get some work done nearly every day of my adult life, without impressive financial success. Yet I would do it all over again in a hot second, mistakes and doldrums and breakdowns and all. Sometimes I could not tell you exactly why, especially when it feels pointless and pitiful, like Sisyphus with cash-flow problems.

You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

So I'd start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

The problem with competition is that it takes away the requirement to set your own path, to invent your own method, to find a new way.

I think art is the ability to change people with your work, to see things as they are and then create stories, images, and interactions that change the marketplace.

Heretics must believe. More than anyone else in an organization, it's the person who's challenging the status quo, the one who is daring to be great, who is truly present and not just punching a clock who must have confidence in her beliefs. Can you imagine Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It's nice to get paid. It's essential to believe.

You get to keep making art as long as you are willing to make the choices that let you make your art.

People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they're not willing to start something separate, world-changing, and risky, they have no business starting anything. Somehow, we've fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, and a stock ticker symbol to matter.