Even the best writer has to erase sometimes.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Had I been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented, except literally to get out of hell.

The lash may force men to physical labor, it cannot force them to spiritual creativity.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work “comes” to him.

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.