#creative

Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created. ↗

— Timothy Simpson

#beauty #boredom-to-brilliance #creative-process #timothy-simpson #art

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#creative-process #fiction #realism #truth #writing

In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life." (Barnes & Noble Review, email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009) ↗

— T.C. Boyle

#creative-process #self-confidence #self-trust #writing #life

[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

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

What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#narration #architecture

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

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life. ↗

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

#creative #inspirational #solitude #inspirational

About writing:The trick is to make sure you love what you've produced--to Believe..in order to convince. ↗

— Christina Westover

#christina-westover #creative-visualization #inspiration #precipice #writing