Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

Creativity was definitely a big part of our household, and I remember always writing stories and being encouraged to be creative.

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

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

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

That's the most important thing in art: to be aware, pay attention, be inspired - but it should come ultimately from you.

Art! What a concept! It saved my life! A place where you can do as you please!

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

[Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.

The secret sauce of the business that I can offer is my creativity, and in order to keep my creativity alive and fresh, I have to pretend that no one is watching the show, that there are no audiences, there are no ratings; I'm just telling a story.

My creativity is an entity unto its own.

I like being creative.