Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.

Creativity is down the tube. And people give a lot of lip service to individuality. I know they all appreciate it, but they all say they would like to do it, but they don't want to work at it, and it doesn't come out of the sky.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

I feel I've been blessed with a gift of creativity and composition. That's why I've been able to keep going.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

If I have a talent, it lies in the creative process.

No one purposefully paints a bad painting. It's someone who's trying to do a good painting, but it's terrible. I have one with a matador, and the bull is going through the blanket. You can tell the painter didn't know how to paint it.

Some songs just fall out of you. And some you have to wrestle out like an abscess.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.