creativity Quotes

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

In a way, a lot of my humor comes from presenting things that are dramatic or shocking and then people not having socially appropriate responses, having people denying the drama by failing to react to it, and that's a really classic form of humor.

In almost all my work, I try to re-invent Christian images and stories and themes. You'd be amazed by the letters I get from young Christians who recognise this and enjoy it.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.