Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.

One day I'll paint the perfect sunset - - if I can only find the words.

Think of something useless, and that's probably what I'll be doing. Listen, Virginia, we need to love the useless. We need to raise pigeons without a thought of eating them, plant rose bushes without...

It's harder to make the glass than break the glass.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

If you would create something, you must be something.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth - century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold...

the beauty of the creative gesture is wild, unwilling and painful.

But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my...

Everyone doesn't have to do everything... People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created...

I promptly forgot about him and prepared a blend of Creativi - Tea, since I had some fantasy role - players coming in for their weekly dungeon crawl, and the DM always wanted a little something extra...

Explore the rugged edge of thought. Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.

Don't be tossed away by your monkey mind. You say you want to do something - "I really want to be a writer" - then that little voice comes along, "but I might not make enough money as a writer." "Oh,...

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it {whatever it is} until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of...

... perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less...

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel - in - progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths... hoping to get lost in a thicket.

Pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn't...

The overplanners just take longer to be wrong and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed.

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

What is dollar value but something to amuse people who have no imagination? People who have money and no imagination follow fashion. People who have imagination and no money fashion styles.

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

Anyone who goes into writing has to find out somewhere along the line, he's either naïve or insane.

In fact, many features of hypomania — such as outgoingness, increased energy, intensified sexuality, increased risk-taking, persuasiveness, self-confidence, and heightened productivity — have been...

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It's better that way.

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been...