By Category: Creativity

“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”

-Franz Kafka

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“Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

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“Robert Lowell also didn't come while I was there. Sylvia Plath had come and gone. What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?”

-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

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“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

-Stephen King

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“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

-Rudyard Kipling

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“Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,
he dejado de ver tu barba Ilena de mariposas.

(Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman,
have I ceased seeing your beard full of butterflies.)”

-Oda a Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca

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“In this world it is very difficult to know what to do. One struggles to know good from evil, but really they're so often so very much alike. I always think those people fortunate who are content to stand, without question, by the Ten Commandments, knowing exactly how to conduct themselves and propped up by the hope of Paradise on the other. But we who answer Why to the crude Thou shalt not are like sailors on a wintry sea without a compass: reason and instinct say one thing, and convention says another; but the worst of it is that one's conscience has been reared on the Decalogue and fostered on hell-fire, and one's conscience has the last word. I daresay it's cowardly, but it's certainly discreet, to take it into consideration; it's like lobster salad: it's not immoral to eat it, but you will very likely have indigestion. One has to be very sure of oneself to go against the ordinary view of things; and if one isn't, perhaps it's better not to run any risks, but just to walk along the same secure old road as the common herd. It's not exhilarating, it's not brave, and it's rather dull; but it's eminently safe.”

-Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

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“She found unexpected satisfaction in the half-forgotten masterpieces of the past, in poets not quite divine whom fashion had left on the side, int he playwrites, novelists and essayists whose remembrance lives only with the bookworm. It is a relief sometimes to look away from the bright sun of perfect achievement; and the writers who appealed to their age and not to posterity have by contrast a subtle charm. Undazzled by their splendour, one may discern more easily their individualities and the spirit of their time; they have pleasant qualities not always found among their betters, and there is even a certain pathos in their incomplete success.”

-Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

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“You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.”

-Twelve, Nick McDonell

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“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already there.”

-Sexus, Henry Miller

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“Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.”

-Michel de Montaigne

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“Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as useful as bread.”

-Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

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“Piles of empty pages like mountains of potential failure.
I didn't know if I could justify myself enough to breathe in.”

-Going to Breathe Again, Namelessnumberheadman

Recommended by Shay.

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“For the true poet a metaphor is not a figure of speech, but a vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place of a concept. To him a character is not an aggregate composed of a number of particular traits, but an organic person pressing himself upon his attention. [...] We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all bad poets.”

-The Birth Of Tragedy, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.

Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”

-Introduction to Civil War 1916-1937, John Dos Passos

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“I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.”

-from a poem when she was 15 or 16, Sylvia Plath

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“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you overdramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important onces. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to... No matter how it comes out, I have to write it.”

-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

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“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

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“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”

-to Selden Rodman in 1956, Conversations with Artists, Jackson Pollack

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“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.”

-Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud

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“It seemed like such poor taste, sort of, to want to act in the first place. I mean all the ego. And I used to hate myself so, when I was in a play, to be backstage after the play was over. All those egos running around feeling terribly charitable and warm. Kissing everybody and wearing their makeup all over the place, and then trying to be horribly natural and friendly when your friends came backstage to see you. I just hated myself. .... It was just that I would've been ashamed if, say, anybody I respected--my brothers, for example--came and heard me deliver some of the lines I had to say. I used to write certain people and tell them not to come.”

-Franny And Zooey, J.D. Salinger

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“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

-Good Morning, America, Carl Sandburg

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“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to annihilation. For in the books they write, they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

-The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

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“Any writer, any artist, I'm sure is obsessed with death, a prerequisite for life.”

-Anne Sexton

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“...there cannot 'be Being' without the eclipse, the inward contradiction of non-being. But non-being which, according to the mystics, 'is so that Being can be', presses on existence as does a vacuum on a membrane. Art brings vehement confirmation. At the heart of form lies a sadness, a trace of loss. A carving is the death of a stone.”

-Grammars of Creation, George Steiner

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