Quotes about Creativity

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind — that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that's constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality — its inexpressibility.

But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success is conducive to writing.

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.

A few can touch the magic string, and noisy fame is proud to win them: Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!

People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

A new and valid idea is worth more than a regiment and fewer men can furnish the former than command the latter.

Somehow we human beings are never happier than when we are expressing the deepest gifts that are truly us.

Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.

The proper school to learn art is not life but art

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.