Quotes about Creativity

All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it's an absolute toss-up, isn't it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

I say--I've thought of a good plot for a detective story. Really? Top--hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.' 'I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.' 'It might be the wisest thing you could do.' 'Write it out and get rid of it?' 'Yes.' 'I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell.' 'What would that matter, if it made a good book?

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …

The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;

This is the Christian faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved." The harsh and much-disputed statement begins to look like a blunt statement of fact, for how can anyone make anything of life if there is no belief in life? If we truly desire a creative life for ourselves and other people, it is our task to rebuild the world along creative lines, but we must be sure that we desire it enough.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day — for a bit, anyhow.

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

Me personally, I want to entertain people above all. When you look back at burlesque in history and the real golden age of burlesque, those entertainers were there to entertain, and there wasn't usually some big political message behind what they were doing.