Creativity needs to be taken care of. It's like a big baby that needs to be nourished.
The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head's going to explode with ideas.
How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that. . . we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.
A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful or influential in a particular social setting.
Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.
It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.
Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ.
When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.
I have killed no men, that, in the first place, didn't deserve killing
Reached only by boat, seaplane and, with less surety, telephone-this is Fire Island, a pile of sand beneath a pile of people.