Jack Prelutsky Quotes

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.

When you're in the middle of writing a song, you can come up with this whole web of stuff only you know how to get through. That's very entertaining for me to do that.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

I'll write lines or words in a notepad. You work on little things and little parts; sometimes they turn into bigger songs.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

It doesn't matter where I'm at - if I'm somewhere sitting still for more than an hour, rhymes start popping in my head... It's just kinda instilled in me.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.