Samuel Johnson Quotes

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about in my dressing room is that one day I would do it.

I knew I wanted to be creative but didn't know how.

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

I have notebooks all over the place. I write little stories for my cabaret.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

I always wanted to write poetry, even when I was very young.

Isn't the drawing board the place where all the best work happens? It's not a bad thing to go back there. It's the entire point.

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

A word only writes its night and rides its dream.

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

Writing was my real life and I was more at home with the people of my imagination than with the best I met in the objective world.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.