Thought Catalog

33 Quotes To Help You Bust Through Your Artistic Block And Get Creating Again

Because we all need a little reminding of our love for what we do. 
Heidi Priebe
July 7, 2016
“The pleasures of writing include acting like exaggerations of your most-extreme self. ”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Reddit.com
Tagged: Extreme, Writing
“All you have to do is write one true sentence.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Complete Poems
Tagged: Writing, Finding The Right Words
“Scare the world. Be exactly who you say you are and tell the truth.”
— Iain Cain Thomas, No Title
Tagged: Writing, Self-Expression, Creativity, Self-Promotion, Ambition
“Here’s my advice for anybody out there who is creative and scared: Shout until they fucking hear you. And then shout even louder.”
— Chris Gethard, The Chris Gethard Show
Tagged: Creativity, Writing, Fear, Self-Expression
“If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.”
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Tagged: Creativity, Talent, Mentors, Artistic Growth
“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.”
— Annette Messager, No Title
Tagged: Artist, Self-Expression, Writing, Poetry
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London, No Title
Tagged: inspiration, Creativity, Work, Concentration, motivation
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
— Ernest Hemingway, No Title
Tagged: Writing, Creativity, Pain, Self-Expression, Poetry
“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”
— Arnold Glasgow, No Title
Tagged: Success, Work, Self-Expression, Creativity, perseverance
“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.”
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Tagged: Storytelling, Tell Your Story, Lean In, Woman, Writing
“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life, Writing, Career, Growing Pains, Passion
“The honest to god truth? In the year prior to becoming a full-time producer and writer, I wrote over 350 pieces for various publications. I worked to get where I am today. It wasn’t just lucky. It was work. But I’d do it all over again.”
— Kendra Syrdal, 5 Things (5.8.16)
Tagged: Writing on the internet, Writing, feminism, Career, How to be a writer
“I thought about the notebooks I filled up in high school, the ones that I’m still too scared to open up and revisit, not because I think my bad writing will make me cringe, but because I’m afraid my bad writing will make me yearn to write like that again—and I don’t mean writing poems that compare my loneliness to a black hole or my love to a prairie devastated by fire, but rather to write with tremendous heart and without concern for taste or craft, without concern for the entire wretched literary canon that has come before me, the literary canon that is still mostly populated by boring, uninspiring white dudes whose writing will never change my life.”
— Jenny Zhang, The Importance Of Angsty Art
Tagged: Writing, Art, Creation, Innocennce, Freedom, Literary Liberation, How I Feel Today
“I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, ‘Can I do something with that?'”
— No Results Found
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer, Transparency
“No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer's block endemic? 

The reason we don't get talker's block is that we're in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied. We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn't, and if we're insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker's block after all this practice? 

Writer's block isn't hard to cure. Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.”
— Seth Godin, Talker's Block
Tagged: Writing, Psychology, Philosophy, Breakdown = Breakthrough
“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.”
— Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197: An Interview by Lila Azam Zanganeh
Tagged: Intellect, Creativity, Knowledge, Production
“My work as a sculptor has trained me to write in the same way. When I start a piece I work it from all directions. I jump back and forth from section to section in no particular order. I leave broad ideas and impressions everywhere. I make notations and draw charts. I don’t write in complete sentences. I don’t bother with spelling, and I don’t fuss with exacting language.”
— Annie Weatherwax, Structure: What Writers Can Learn from Visual Artists
Tagged: Writing, Being A Writer, The Craft Of Writing, The Art Of Writing, Art And Writing
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
— Stephen King, Writing Tips From Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’
Tagged: Writing, Fear, Inspirational, Courage, Wisdom
“Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could...”
— Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
Tagged: Creativity, Art, Artistic Growth, Self-Expression, Self-Confidence
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Tagged: Writing, Pain, Trauma, Healing, Honesty, expression, Self-Expression, vulnerability
“Yet writing a poem about something painful, she has discovered, can be her way of digesting it. 'One of the things I’ve learned is, if we try and put sadness off, it just waits. And in my experience, running away from sadness doesn’t do anybody any good.'”
— Frieda Hughes, Frieda Hughes: ‘I felt my parents were stolen’
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Literature, Pain, Sad, Loneliness, Depression
“A good writer knew when not to write.”
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Tagged: Writing, Good Writers, Timing, Passion
“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (Ala Notable Books for Adults)
Tagged: Writing, Novels, Meaning, purpose
“Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Writing, Working, Working Hard, Passion
“Art is about making decisions.”
— Juliet Patterson, 'Brief Words About The Sentence,' Eleventh Hour Lecture Series
Tagged: Eleventh Hour Lecture Series, Iowa Summer Writing Festival 2016, Writing, Being A Writer, Writing Tips, Art, Art & Expression, Making Decisions
“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 15 quotes from Chimamanda Adichie that have changed the way I look at social issues
Tagged: dignity, Pride, Stories, Writing, humanity, Storytelling
“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked… That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
— Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
Tagged: Writing, drawing, Dancing, Passion
“Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

Make it on the good days too.”
— Neil Gaiman, Make Good Art
Tagged: Art, Depression, Creativity
“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction
Tagged: Writing, Words, Life, Living, Reflection
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
Tagged: Art, Creation, Creativity