Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

Stay humble; don't interfere; respect your creative genius

Can you draw a picture on the blackboard when somebody doesn't want you to? asked the rooster promptly. Yes, answered Kenny, if you write them a very nice poem. What is an only goat? A lonely goat,...

Try saying this: "I enjoy my creativity." And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it. For one thing, it will freak people out. I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only...

You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting - its partner - and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing...

There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

You have to imagine things before you can do them. Stories help us see.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

This man was so absent-mindedly clever that he could paint pictures that didn't just follow you around the room but went home with you and did the washing-up.

It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that...

Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

Einstein famously said if at first an idea is not absurd, there's no hope for it.

I have often been asked where the inspiration for my books comes from. I wouldn’t know how to answer. On the journey of life, I accumulate experiences that get imprinted in the deepest layers of...

The time travelers are usually adept at intercrossing different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole...

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.

What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?

He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under...

It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its...

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

There's so much to write. Where should I start?I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.

. . . in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a...

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody...