#creative

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#books #creative-process #creativity #editing #editing-humor

I sat down and tried to write a story. "Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight." That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#funny #humor #writer-s-block #writing #writing-process

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." (Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4) ↗

— David McCullough

#creative-process #precision #thinking #thought #writing

My life will be the best illustration of all my work. ↗

— Hans Christian Andersen

#illustration #life #work #writing #writing-process

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

#creative-process #writing #writing-process

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) ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#expectations #honesty #integrity #on-writing #pandering

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much. ↗

— Criss Jami

#challenge #clever #cognition #cognitive #cognitive-psychology

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#creative-process #encouragement #inspirational #art

I don't want to use my creative energy on somebody else's user interface. ↗

— Jeff Bezos

#creative energy #else #energy #i #interface

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. [Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992] ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#author-quotes #creative-process #earning-a-living #gift #humor