Creativity is really the structuring of magic.
Ann Kent Rush

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

It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative to the end of a long life; he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he cannot have it, must despair.
Humphrey Trevelyan

What transforms the merely sad into something tragic – and therefore beautiful, and therefore saving, and therefore, in some odd way, joyful – is the telling of the story. It’s what makes us human beings. Everybody was put here to do this.
James Carroll

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
Janet Frame

An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation.
Lewis Hyde

Far away, there in the sunshine, are my highest aspirations. I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.
Louisa May Alcott

It’s like (to me) asking why you want to write. Who cares? You have to, and that’s that. But the kids, like the writing, belong ultimately to themselves, and not to you. In fact, they’re very like the writing. A gift, given to you by life, undeserved like all grace is undeserved by its very nature, and not to be owned ….
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Margaret Atwood, 10 January 1971

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
May Sarton

The world is made up of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. … But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between.
Stephen Leacock

Living in process is being open to insight and encounter. Creativity is becoming intensely absorbed in the process and giving it form.
Susan Smith

You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Suzanne Warner Pierot

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin

All aglow in the work.
Virgil