#creative

Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests. ↗

— Jeffrey Wright

#bluegrass #blues #classical #creative #i

To express yourself in a creative way you don't need structure you need an empty mind. ↗

— E'yen A. Gardner

#inspirational-life #spiritual-life #inspirational

My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter. ↗

— Gary Reilly

#humor #imagination #writer-s-block #writing #imagination

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start." (Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#dialogue #writing #paris

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#masterpiece #pain #art

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#creativity #writing #writing-advice #writing-process #writing-advice

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

It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things. ↗

— C.A. Dawson Scott

#change #creative-vision #creativity #human-nature #world-community

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

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer. ↗

— Stephanie Lennox

#inspiration #writer #writers-on-writing #writing #inspirational