By Category: Creativity

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

-Stella Adler

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“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. ”

-A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes

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“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

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“As I hide behind these books I read,
While scribbling my poetry,
Like art could save a wretch like me,
With some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.
And everything I made is trite and cheap
And a waste of paint, of tape, of time.”

-Waste of Paint, Bright Eyes

Recommended by Shay.

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“An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”

-Notes From a Dirty Old Man, Charles Bukowski

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“I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.”

-William S. Burroughs

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“Man can allow himself to denounce the total injustice of the world and then demand a total justice which he alone will create. But he cannot affirm the total hideousness of the world. To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it.”

-The Rebel, Albert Camus

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“It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of...as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if she or he writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.”

-Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

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“Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.”

-Van Cliburn

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“When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.”

-Generation X, Douglas Coupland

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“I could never get your attention
I could never please you
The verses are wasted on words you won't relate to
On words you'll never hear.”

-The Rhyme Scheme, Cursive

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“We don't read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for.”

-The Dead Poet's Society [movie]

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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

-The White Album, Joan Didion

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“'People in books are good and noble and unselfish and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswaggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?' I asked too loudly. 'Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after a sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox,' I said, pointing at a pile of them, 'and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?'”

-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

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“The only thing that separates a poet from madness is a thin sheet of paper.”

-Elsa

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“Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.”

-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry

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“Florentino Ariza wrote every night. Letter by letter, he had no mercy as he poisoned himself with the smoke from the palm oil lamps in the back room of the notions shop, and his letters became more discursive and more lunatic the more he tried to imitate his favorite poets from the Popular Library, which even at that time was approaching eighty volumes. His mother, who had urged him with so much fervor to enjoy his torment, became concerned for his health. 'You are going to wear out your brains,' she shouted at him from the bedroom when she heard the first roosters crow. 'No woman is worth all that.' She could not remember ever having known anyone in such a state of unbridled passion. But he paid no attention to her. Sometimes he went to the office without having slept, his hair in an uproar of love after leaving the letter in the prearranged hiding place so that Fermina Daza would find it on her way to school. She, on the other hand, under the watchful eye of her father and the vicious spying of the nuns, could barely manage to fill half a page from her notebook when she locked herself in the bathroom or pretended to take notes in class. But this was not only due to her limited time and the danger of being taken by surprise, it was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentine Ariza burned himself alive with every line.”

-Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?”

-Howl, Allen Ginsberg

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“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

-Paul Guaguin

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“The woman poet must be either a ... sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.”

-Marilyn Hacker

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“There was Wanda, the struggling Polish painter; dark for a Pole with her short, stiff black hair, and her dusky skin, and her colourless lips; yet not withal unattractive, this Wanda. She had wonderful eyes that held fire in their depths, hell-fire at times, if she had been drinking; but at other times a more gentle flame; although never one that it was safe to play with. Wanda saw largely. All that she envisaged was immense: her pictures, her passions, her remorses. She craved with a wellnigh insatiable craving, she feared with a wellnigh intolerable terror â€" not the devil, she was brave with him when in her cups, but God in the person of Christ the Redeemer. Like a whipped cur she crawled to the foot of the Cross, without courage, without faith, without hope of mercy. Outraged by her body she must ruthlessly scourge it - no good, the lust of the eye would betray her. Seeing she desired and desiring she drank, seeking to drown one lust in another. And then she would stand up before her tall easel, swaying a little but with hand always steady. The brandy went into her legs, not her hands; her hands would remain disconcertingly steady. She would start some gigantic and heart-broken daub, struggling to lose herself in her picture, struggling to ease the ache of her passion by smearing the placid white face of the canvas with ungainly yet strangely arresting forms - according to Dupont, Wanda had genius.”

-The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall

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“Abstract design is all right- for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience... Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use a language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.”

-Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

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“Anybody can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman that she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older that eighteen in her heart... no matter what merciless hours have done. Look at her. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me- but it does to them. Look at her!”

-Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

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“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”

-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

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“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.”

-Erica Jong

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