Michelle Hillstrom > Michelle's Quotes

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#1

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

tags: absurd, beauty, perverse, solitude

1764 likes

#2

“If a man has to say trust me, Gogu conveyed, it's a sure sign you cannot. Trust him, that is. Trust is a thing you know without words.”
― Juliet Marillier, Wildwood Dancing

1119 likes

#3

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

tags: advice-for-writers, awareness, life

2734 likes

#4

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

tags: humor, inspirational, philosophy, wisdom

7746 likes

#5

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

tags: attributed-no-source, books, simile, soul

135564 likes

#6

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Steve Jobs

68208 likes

#7

“A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained.”
― Ruth K. Westheimer

1994 likes

#8

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

1206 likes

#9

“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
― Guy de Maupassant

tags: books

2847 likes

#10

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

tags: happiness

2530 likes

#11

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

4612 likes

#12

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: creative-process, creativity, inspirational, mental-illness, outsider, self-discovery

1290 likes

#13

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

tags: arbitrariness, beginning, creative-process, end, storytelling, writing

609 likes

#14

“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
― Marcel Duchamp

tags: art, creative-process, creativity

300 likes

#15

“I don't know exactly where ideas come from, but when I'm working well ideas just appear. I've heard other people say similar things - so it's one of the ways I know there's help and guidance out there. It's just a matter of our figuring out how to receive the ideas or information that are waiting to be heard.”
― Jim Henson

tags: creative-process, inspiration

134 likes

#16

“10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer

Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing.”
― Brian Clark

tags: creative-process, writing, writing-advice, writing-process

164 likes

#17

“Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.”
― Red Haircrow

tags: creative-process, creative-thinking, creative-writing, creativity, individuality, life, life-lessons, reality, writers, writers-on-writing, writing, writing-from-the-heart, writing-process

214 likes

#18

“When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

tags: art, creative-process, creativity, inspiration

105 likes

#19

“...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mould. It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

tags: art, artists, be-yourself, catholic-author, creative-process, encouragement, funny, gadfly, humor, humor-inspirational, individuality, inspirational, ironic, irony, irony-of-life, rebel, rebellion, rebels, stupidity, stupidity-of-man, uniqueness

203 likes

#20

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

tags: creative-process

228 likes

#21

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
― Marcel Duchamp

tags: appreciation, art, creative-process, creativity

115 likes

#22

“[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."

(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”
― P.G. Wodehouse

tags: creative-process, dialogue, writing

64 likes

#23

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”
― David McCullough

tags: clarity, creative-process, precision, thinking, thought, writing

275 likes

#24

“The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition

tags: creative-process, creativity, writing-process

83 likes

#25

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

tags: creative-process, expectations, honesty, integrity, on-writing, pandering, self-expression, selling-out, writing

23 likes

#27

“To express yourself in a creative way you don't need structure you need an empty mind.”
― E'yen A. Gardner

tags: creative-process, inspirational-life, spiritual-life

14 likes

#28

“She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

tags: art, artist, artistic, artists, artists-life, arts, arts-and-humanities, creative-people, creative-process, creative-work, creativity, imagination, inspiration, painters, painting, solitude, thrilling-life

18 likes

#29

“People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.”
― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

tags: books, creative-process, writing

45 likes

#30

“Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.

[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]”
― Cormac McCarthy

tags: authorship, creation, creative-process, driving-forces, hardship, pain, writing

47 likes

#31

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]”
― Cormac McCarthy

tags: ability, author-quotes, creative-process, earning-a-living, gift, humor, inspirational-quotes, quotes, self-confidence, self-support, talent, writing, writing-life, writing-quotes

44 likes

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