Creative Delusion Quotes

Men think that not being able to wire a plug somehow makes them more creative or intellectual. It just makes them morons.

I thought maybe I could become like the next Van Gogh. I bought a sunflower and painted it, and it looked like the work of a 6-year-old.

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

I wasn’t thriving socially, so I stayed in my room and played guitar all the time, at the time, I thought I was inventing a new sound that would change the whole outlook of music. I’ve discovered in the last few years that it was just the Seattle Sub Pop sound.

We've sweated and torn out our hair trying to reconstruct our chosen lives, to fashion them like literary sculptures, at once monumental and yet human. We've applied all of our intelligence, our empathy, our critical faculties, our compassion - and we think, in our delusion, that it's still 1960, and our work is going to get noticed.

The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exist any real links between that past and a future worthy of it.

When we're in the shower, when we're thinking about our idea - boy, does it sound brilliant. But the reality is that most of our ideas are actually terrible.

And in Hollywood, you know, everyone is an expert. Most of them are expert editors. They can't direct, they can't write, they can't act, but, by God, they all think they can edit.

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer.

In Hollywood, you kind of trick yourself into feeling like you have impact.

I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.