Literature And Creativity Quotes & Sayings

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time. — Julian Barnes

Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist's life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation. — Kilroy J. Oldster

People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature. — Lionel Suggs

In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe. — E.L. Konigsburg

Creativity in any form stimulates creativity in every form, music, arts, literature ... I find inspiration in anything. It's all the same. — Marc Jacobs

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. — Roger Kimball

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains. — Henri Bergson

Indeed, very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange, and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. The fact is that the other organ which we call the brain, the one with which we came into the world, the one which we transport around in our head and which transports us so that we can transport it, has only ever had very general, vague, diffuse and, above all, unimaginative ideas about what the hands and fingers should do. For example, if the brain-in-our-head suddenly gets an idea for a painting, a sculpture, a piece of music or literature, or a clay figurine, it simply sends a signal to that effect and then waits to see what will happen — Jose Saramago

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language. — Jamie L. Harding

Where do starfish come from?" asked Sam.
"From the sky," answered Stella. "Starfish are shooting stars that fell in love with the sea."
"Weren't the stars afraid of drowning?" asked Sam.
"No," said Stella. "They all learned how to swim. — Marie-Louise Gay

A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community. — Martin O'Malley

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large. — Aberjhani

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments. — Alain De Botton

The disobedient child is continuously condemned. The obedient child is, on the other hand, continuously praised. But have you heard of any obedient child having become world-famous in any dimension of creativity? Have you heard of any obedient child who has attained the Nobel prize for anything - literature, peace, science? The obedient child becomes just the common crowd. All that is added to existence is added by the disobedient. — Rajneesh

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years. — Aberjhani

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action. — Marilyn Butler

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief. — Marcus Valerius Martialis

(the modern writer's aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole. — Sean O'Faolain

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... The wait is simply too long. — Leonard Bernstein

I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world. — Catherine Lowell

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza! — Roman Payne

Literature offered a safe circumscribed outlet for sadness. — Richard Brookhiser

Early Islam was a time of great creativity. Scholars excelled in sciences and literature. Our religion should not be a shield behind which we hide from the world but a driving force that inspires us to innovate and contribute to our surroundings. This is the true spirit of Islam. — Basmah Bint Saud

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.
I don't want to write anything but takes. — Julio Cortazar

Literature is like a subtle concoction of laboriously collected peripherals called words, intellect,thoughts,imagination,creativity and aestheticism brewed together to form a resplendent work of art. — Shilpa Sandesh

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength. — Lawrence Clark Powell

The 'Muse' is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake. — Roman Payne

We knock upon silence for an answering music. — Archibald MacLeish

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them
with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ... — Eudora Welty

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies. — Julian Barnes

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife. — Roman Payne

Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality ... is conscious and alert ... The lower personality is a ... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature ... — E. M. Forster

These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection. — Geoffrey Miller

Man is certainly not creative, but his creativity should not be concerned with God. His creativity should be concerned with making a better world, a better society, better literature, better poetry, better paintings, better sculpture, better human beings. — Rajneesh

Accepting who we are is a practice of non-harming. Sadly, much self-help literature contains seeds of harm: We are urged to remake ourselves into someone who will be spiritually or psychologically acceptable, and that acceptance is conditional on our performance in the areas of therapy, growth, or meditation. We are still not accepting ourselves unconditionally, just as we are in this moment, with a full and joyful heart. A more merciful practice begins with acceptance. It begins with the assumption that we were never broken, never defective. By surrendering into a deep acceptance of our own nature - rather than by tearing apart who we are - we actually make more room for genuine, rich, merciful, playful growth and change. If we feel our fundamental strength, creativity, and wisdom, then change is not frightening at all. Things simply fall away when they are ready, making room for the rich harvest underneath. — Wayne Muller

What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point. — Malorie Blackman

The Christian publishing world has embraced the safe over the good — J. Mark Bertrand

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that ... we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

The operation would be in a week...I didn't know if I would survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing for a master's on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country's literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household with the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father's request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my {brother's} academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house. — Hassan Blasim

Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist. — Neil Postman

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is. — Jan Neruda

All the while that Jean was listening to him, he was vaguely conscious that what gives literature its reality is the result of work accomplished by the human spirit, no matter what the material facts that may have stimulated it (a walk, a night of love, a social drama), of a sort of discovery in the world of the spirit, of the emotions, made by the human intelligence, so that the value of a book is never in the material presented by the writer, but in the nature of the operation he performs upon it. — Marcel Proust

Literature is painting, architecture, and music. — Yevgeny Zamyatin