Jack Vance Quotes

Human requirements are the inspiration for art.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

One of the greatest things about the theatre is how it can completely change the way you see the world around you. 'Dear Evan Hansen' did this for me.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

Writing is only a guided dream.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

I personally just love movies about the creative process.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

Oh my God the fantasies are my favorite thing that we do each episode by far. And the great thing now is that instead of one an episode sometimes we do as many as two. We did one in each of the mini-series. And so far - I mean I keep thinking I can't have another favorite and then they keep topping it.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

You have to stop living in order to write.

Serious art is born from serious play.

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I don't tend to work directly from life, except in trying to mimic or match the outlines of its insanity. In other words, when I live through something, I just try to say to myself, "OK, remember this - life is really this crazy or scary or beautiful or surprising - so try to 'get at' that in your stories.

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.