Creative Assimilation Quotes

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

In our work, the question is, how much you absorb from others. So for me, creativity, is really like a relay race. As children we are handed a baton. Rather than passing it onto the next generation as is, first we need to digest it and make it our own.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done. And then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.

I really pull from everyone. I'm absorbent.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

Composers, artists, actors, singers - all of them, I think, unconsciously learn from others. I'm sure it's not conscious, but they can't help it.

What I do is, I'm like a disease that infects real people and I take them over. We can start off in a very journalistic mode describing a character and observing a character - and that's what I do with a lot of characters in my books. And then my imagination eats them alive.

A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.