Quotes about Creativity

What she said in To the Lighthouse of Lily Briscoe's art she might have said of her own: that the pen was 'the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos . . .',73 and the godlike power she felt as a writer is perfectly embodied in a passage from that novel.

Knitting is the saving of life.

Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined absurdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the edge of the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo, Mrs. Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a moment before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead. Let us find another picture to cut out, she said.

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

Nothing happens here except that I write and write, and curse and burn.

Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported what the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf. Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.

conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form.

BRAIN: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to fertilize ideas.

A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Some poems took years to find their words.

I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.