You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury

Creativity is about constraints. Weirdly, many people seem to see creativity as the opposite, as being about expansion. We must think outside the box. We must generate ideas. The problem of how to be creative is the problem of thinking up things. But this is wrong. Or in any case, the opposite is just as correct. Creativity is all about thinking inside the right box. There is an infinite amount of possible ideas. The problem is not how to come up with ideas, but how to remove the ideas that are no good. The problem is not how to think outside the box, but where on the infinite plain of thought to put it. Creative work is about finding ever narrower constraints, until you are left with only one idea that fits the bill. That’s the right one.

via Themes, Creativity, and Constraints « Tape Noise Diary.

Write it down, when I have perished:
Here is everything I’ve cherished;
That these walls should glow with beauty
Spurred my lagging soul to duty;
That there should be gladness here
Kept me toiling, year by year…
Every thought and every act
Were to keep this home intact.

-Edgar A. Guest

This is just how I felt waiting outside in the dark, half an hour standing in the pouring rain at the bus stop. I was soaked through when I finally got home. Right through my Winter coat, even my bra was wet.

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” Anne Lamott

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.

I don’t often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

Because we build the worlds we wouldn’t mind living in. They contain scary things, problems, but also a sense of rightness that makes them alive and makes us want to live there.

That’s what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

I do outlines when I’m writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom.

The thing is, emotion – if it’s visibly felt by the writer – will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

Anne McCaffrey Quotes

Anne McCaffrey.com

Writers procrastinate because they do not feel inspired. Feeling inspired is a luxury. Writing, often excellent writing, can be done without the benefit of feeling inspired. What writers tell themselves while they procrastinate is that they just don’t have enough ideas yet, and when they do, then they’ll start writing. It actually works exactly backward. When we start to write, we prime the pump and the flow of ideas begins to move. It is the act of writing that calls ideas forward, not ideas that call forward writing.

– Julia Cameron

From the Boing Boing forum on Flickr come these photography quotations picked by forum readers:

“Photography…it’s the easiest medium in which to be competent. Anybody with a point-and-shoot camera can take a competent picture. But it’s the hardest medium in which to have, to express, some kind of personal vision. Because there is no touch, there is no hand, there is no physicality. The fact that you CAN have something that’s recognizable from 50 feet across the gallery as a Diane Arbus or an Irving Penn…the fact that you can have recognizable authorship means they really have done something.” ~ Chuck Close

“…to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” – Susan Sontag

“The best camera is the one that’s with you” – Chase Jarvis

“Shoot for the secrets, develop for the surprises” – Diane Arbus

“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” Diane Arbus

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” – Robert Capa

“He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful.” – William McCleery

“No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” – Robert Adams

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” – Matt Hardy

“Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.” – Elliott Erwitt

“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.” – Imogen Cunningham

“You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” – William Albert Allard

“If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.” – Garry Winogrand

“I always thought good photos were like good jokes. If you have to explain it, it just isn’t that good.” – Anonymous

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” – Ansel Adams

“It can be a trap of the photographer to think that his or her best pictures were the ones that were hardest to get.” – Timothy Allen

Lucius Annaeus Seneca – Religion is regarded by the common people as true by the wise as false and by the rulers as useful.

The brain enjoys writing. It enjoys the act of naming things, the process of association and discernment. Picking words is like picking apples: this one looks delicious. Writing – and this is a big secret – wants to be written. Writing loves a writer the way God loves a true devotee. Writing will fill your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help to fill your life.

- Julia Cameron.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. – Ingrid Bengis