Creativity Quotes

"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."

- Maya Angelou

"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless."

- Jamie Paolinetti

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

- Herman Melville

"I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying."

- Oscar Wilde

"Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too."

- Isabel Allende

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

- Martha Graham

"Live out of your imagination, not your history."

- Stephen Covey

"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

- Raymond Joseph Teller

"Sometimes it’s necessary to do unnecessary things."

- Kanade Jinguuji

"Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grows without the thorn."

- Martin Amis

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."

- Toni Morrison

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

- William Wordsworth

"The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

- Joan Didion

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and look at it, until it shines."

- Emily Dickinson

"That’s what you’re looking for as a writer when you’re working. You’re looking for your own freedom."

- Philip Roth

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

- George Bernard Shaw

"Creativity is a combination of discipline and childlike spirit."

- Robert Greene

"Writing is the painting of the voice."

- Voltaire

"I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere and it can do anything."

- Alice Walker

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… it’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless."

- Harper Lee

"There are significant moments in everyone’s day that can make literature. That’s what you ought to write about."

- Raymond Carver

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."

- Gustave Flaubert

"Keep asking questions because people will always want to know the answer. Open with a question and don’t answer it until the end."

- Lee Child

"But when people say, did you always want to be a writer? I have to say no! I always was a write."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."

- Margaret Atwood

"You should write stories because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page."

- Annie Proulx

"I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be stilled."

- Sylvia Plath

"If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart."

- Terry Brooks

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it."

- H.G. Wells