Samuel Johnson Quotes

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.

When I've tried to reinvent the wheel, I get bashed for not doing the familiar things.

When I try to write I try to write something different every time. That's the challenge.

Fashion isn't interesting when it comes from an uninspired place.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.

The best and the worst thing about fashion is that anyone can do it. But because fashion can be the most unintellectual thing, you have to turn it into an intellectual exercise just for your own sanity. You have to start with a conceit.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

If they haven't heard it before it's original.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

If it feels like we're re-creating something rather than creating something, we don't do it.

I just like being versatile, giving new styles and being creative.

The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long.

When you're writing something that is truly original it takes time.

I feel like there is plenty of room for fresh ideas, always.

Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can't read or write, you don't assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn't learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

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

We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.