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dream - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

• a perfect wish
• a shared dream
• dream horse
• falling asleep
• Fantasy Land
• imagination
• reality breaking
• Your worst nightmare

In the twilight yawn of heaven's black rose two tall trees of sombre peeking green, their tops a round as if drawn in mathematical precision. And as I gazed at them for a blessed moment, the kind that could be any length at all in the twinkle of eternity, I saw the eyes of an owl, great and wise. Before I could breathe another, before my brain was capable of any other notion, I was behind those green owl eyes in the sky looking down upon the black-cradled ground. For these were the eyes that watched all the galaxies in the dominion of love, the ones that belong to our guardian, our God. And to them I was a speck, safe and happy, so at home there in the sky, there in a place that touches our reality and yet belongs to another.

From the beauty of the dreamscape, in the place between the thoughts and the movies of the nighttime, came striding an elephant with butterfly ears. Each ear was as a great wing in pinks and baby blue, shimmering, and moving in the way butterfly wings do. When the great elephant had passed, there came a snake into view whom morphed into an eel, then grew fins down the length of its body and soon became a fish. And so the dream spoke of victory, of beauty always remembered and how the selfish snake self became beautiful too.

In the dream I am standing in a puddle, I am normal. Yet my reflection in the puddle, in the world of the upside-down, is a zombie. It is as if all this while I have been trying to achieve this very thing, to separate the good parts of me from the rotten.

To dream so snug within a cottage-cocoon, to feel the sunlight that comes in welcome soon-ness to the budding day, births dreams of Iron Man made butterflies.

Every wise hero realises that dreams come with price tags that have nothing to do with money. If heroic dreams were easy, if capes were free, everyone would have one and this world would be better already.

There are dreams that feel as nightmares yet are the way to a heavenly victory, and it feels as if this lifetime could be one of those. For the dream of the warrior is to fight the good fight, to take on any necessary suffering so that others have a greater chance at good health and wellness.

If I die in battle yet the ones I love are safe, then it is a greater dream than ever-safe while others suffer.

In my dream we were soldiers, you and I. We were dressed as soldiers are, in combat camouflage, guns at the ready. It was nighttime and we stared up a mighty cliff face, yet as we tried to climb the bullets came from all around. Together we fought them, shot dead each one, then resumed our task of reaching the higher ground.

I dreamt of a coin, old and covered in dirt, the engravings worn and the head of the king so tarnished as to be stolen from view. I held it in my left hand, watching the mud dirty my skin. So close to my face the coin had the aroma of stale blood. I turned to my right hand and in the palm was a new spring leaf, crowned by a perfect sphere of dew, reflecting an image of my face, softened and relaxed. When I turned back to the coin, the image of the king had freed himself and journeyed over to the leaf, igniting the growth of strong roots and new foliage that reached for the sunlight, robust, virescent.

The stain had vanished like it was never there in the first place, like the whole thing had been a visual joke. Tyler ran his hands over the fabric before holding it up to the brilliant early morning sun. There was no trace of red, black or any other colour. It was as clean as the day it was created and just as supple, just as beautiful. What had been there yesterday was already fading from his memory, as if it wasn't just erased from the silk, but from history all together. It had been words he was sure, but now that they were gone he felt himself begin to relax. Casting his eyes around him at the trees, listening to the birds, he quite forgot the fabric for a moment. Then when recalled he was holding something he looked down to find only white petals, which he instinctively released into the breeze and watched them float away.

After so long in the maze Shelly was confused as to which path to take. She'd sat there all day, lost, figuring she'd never get out, when Jess just walked right through the walls. She sat and stared as he passed through the maize stems into the still sunlit path. He smiles and beaconed her to come. "Follow me," he said with one of his sheepish grins. Shelly wrapped her fingers into his loose cotton shirt, her heart flooded with relief. She could have walked through them herself she supposed, but it was wonderful to have a guide.

I had thought my jail cell as real for so long that I never even checked to see if the walls were solid. I heard screams from other cells and they paralyzed me from even pushing on the door. Then one spring day when the brilliant light of dawn shone in, I stood and put my hand on the bars. With a prayer I pushed with all my might and a after a brief flash of pain the prison cell itself was left behind me on a hill. From the outside it was tiny, pathetic. After so long crouched in the dark I stood up and let the light warm my skin, my black hair flowing in a heavenly wind. Upon the walls written in stone were the words "fear" and "guilt." I threw my head toward the sky with relief, all I had to do was conquer those bullies all along, conquer them and be free.

In the dream I am sitting in a field of green wheat, the stalks bend lazily in the wind and I marvel at the grains. Each one is distinct and though different from the others, still perfectly formed. I run my hand along the edge to feel the combination of rough and smooth and then hold my face upward to feel the warm light of the mid summer day. The air smells just right and the birds fly in an almost cloudless sky. I start walking, the filed goes on forever and after a while my feet become roots, digging into the soil. My hands become green, soon I am also wheat, and I wave happily in the wind.

In the dream the sky is blue, the birds sing and there is a bee on clover nearby. The streams run clear and there are fish in the river. Next to me is a small boy and he tells me how he sees the world. His answers to my questions are so precious. I ask him if we should care for the world. He says "Yes" like he's surprised I should even have to ask. I ask him if we should be nice to animals, his response is the same. I ask him if we should kill or harm animals and his eyes fill with tears. I ask him if humans should kill one another and he runs, runs like he just saw a monster. I call after him but he won't return. He's a child, and like all children he's still able to see through the light of the creator - he was never taught the answers, he feels them within.

Have you ever had a dream so real you were confused when you woke up? Once when I was a little girl I dreamt that the grass in our backyard was blue. The blue grass rose up into the sky leaving perfect green grass underneath and painted the sky the same perfect shade those soft blades had been. That morning I didn't wake up sleepily, but instead like a switch had been flicked. I ran from my bed to the back yard. And you know what? The grass was green and the sky was blue. I told everyone where the blue grass had gone, but since I was five there was no suggestion I was crazy, just knowing smiles and nods. No-one could tell me it wasn’t real, I’d “seen it” happen and outside was the proof. Seeing is believing right? I guess that’s why I’m so comfortable talking to you. I can see you here with me. You aren’t quite solid yet, I don’t think you can be for a while, don't ask me why yet because you won't like the answer.

Authored by daisy , here .

The dream comes often and only the ending changes. Sometimes I win and sometimes I loose. If I loose it's because I betrayed of love and trust of someone I love more than myself. So long as I do what I know is right, the dream turns out well. I have woken up from the dream many times feeling wretched for my mistakes, only for the blessed relief to come that I didn't really do those things, it was just a dream. Then though my heart feels wretched at least I can face the day. When the dream turns out well I'm never elated, just cosy, happy to stay at home and potter. I don't fear the dream, even when it's bad I welcome the message it brings. Stay true to the ones who love you and the ones you love back.

In my dream there are lights, too many to count, dancing on an ocean too vast to envisage. Each one is brilliant, each one unique. I want to look at each one for the marvel it is, for no matter how many there are no two colours are the same. The light that comes from within is more pure than gold, more light than air - each one a small piece of heaven. I try to reach out to them, who wouldn't want to touch something so pure. But the lights recoil in fright, they don't even know who they are. They chant that they feel ugly on the outside and worse on the inside. I can't understand until I take a look at the water, it looks fine but smells like something I wouldn't want to drink. But they're swimming in it, bobbing in it like it's a fine day at the beach. I want to tell them it's poison but they'll never listen. They laugh and carry on just as before, each one just as beautiful as the last but disconnected even from their inner light and beauty.

In my dream I saw a building grow into the sky, many strands of steel and glass like the stems of a wild plant, organic in shape, coming together and parting. It was a vertical city. Standing underneath and looking left and right, with only soil beneath my feet, it was at least three football stadiums wide and went up as far as the eye could see. All around was nature, just nature... and it was beautiful.

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Freud on Creative Writing and Daydreaming

By maria popova.

Predictably, Freud begins by tracing the subject matter to its roots in childhood, stressing, as Anaïs Nin eloquently did — herself trained in psychoanalysis — the importance of emotional investment in creative writing :

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying.’ The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously — that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion — while separating it sharply from reality.

He then considers, as Henry Miller did in his famous creative routine three decades later, the time scales of the creative process:

The relation of phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it ware, between three times — the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From here it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and now it creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus, past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

He synthesizes the parallel between creative writing and play:

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

He goes on to explore the secretive nature of our daydreams, suggesting that an element of shame keeps us from sharing them with others — perhaps what Jack Kerouac meant when he listed the unspeakable visions of the individual as one of his iconic beliefs and techniques for prose — and considers how the creative writer transcends that to achieve pleasure in the disclosure of these fantasies:

How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal — that is, aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus , or a fore-pleasure , to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame.

For more famous insights on writing, see Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story , David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips , Henry Miller’s eleven commandments , Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques , John Steinbeck’s six pointers , and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings .

— Published October 15, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/15/freud-creative-writers-and-day-dreaming/ —

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10 of the Best Poems about Dreams and Dreaming

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What are the best poems about dreams? The word ‘dreams’, of course, is ambiguous: it can refer to both the imaginative stories and visions our unconscious creates for us while we sleep, but it can also refer to our ambitions and aspirations. Here, we’ve taken ‘dreams’ to mean both these things when compiling this list of ten of the greatest poems about dreams.

We’ve tried to limit ourselves to relatively short poems – the kind that can be read in a five-minute break – and so there’s no ‘ The Dream of the Rood ’ here, one of the earliest poems in English. But we hope you enjoy the poems we have included here.

1. John Donne, ‘ The Dream ’.

Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy, Therefore thou wak’d’st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok’st not, but continued’st it …

So begins this poem from the first great metaphysical poet. What if you were dreaming about someone, only to be woken up by the very person you had been dreaming about?

This scenario is the focus of this lesser-known John Donne poem, which – as in a number of other John Donne poems – sees the poet trying to seduce the woman to coming to bed with him (well, they’re already in bed – but you know what we mean).

2. William Blake, ‘ A Dream ’.

Once a dream did weave a shade O’er my angel-guarded bed, That an emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangle spray, All heart-broke, I heard her say:

‘Oh my children! do they cry, Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see, Now return and weep for me.’

So begins this poem published in Blake’s 1789 book Songs of Innocence , ‘A Dream’ is about Blake’s vision of three insects: an ant (‘emmet’), a beetle, and a glow-worm, which is in fact a kind of beetle. Not only that, but these are talking insects: the emmet confides that she has lost her children, and the bright glow-worm offers to light the way for her through the night, so she can recover them.

3. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘ A Dream within a Dream ’.

How can we separate reality from illusion? What if, to quote from Poe’s poem, ‘All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream’?

One of Poe’s more famous poems, ‘A Dream within a Dream’ muses on the fragility and fleetingness of everything, and asks whether anything we do has any lasting or real effect. As Poe concludes:

O God! Can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

4. Walt Whitman, ‘ I Dreamed in a Dream ’.

I dream’d in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dream’d that was the new City of Friends; Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest …

As the repetition of ‘dream’ in Whitman’s title suggests, this poem combines the two principal meanings of ‘dream’ which we mentioned at the beginning of this post. Whitman dreamt of a utopian city where ‘robust love’ triumphed and flourished, above all else. A wonderful short poem about the perfect society – if only, if only…

5. Christina Rossetti, ‘ I dream of you, to wake ’.

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on; Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone, As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight. In happy dreams I hold you full in night. I blush again who waking look so wan; Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone, In happy dreams your smile makes day of night …

So begins this sonnet is addressed to the speaker’s lover, and contrasts the wonderful, perfect dream world that sleep brings with the less perfect reality that we wake to. If only she could dream all the time, then things would be all right!

One of the finest Victorian love sonnets, and, for our money, one of the best poems about dreams and dreaming. Not one of Rossetti’s most famous poems , but a marvellous poem nevertheless.

6. Emily Dickinson, ‘ We dream – it is good we are dreaming ’.

We dream—it is good we are dreaming— It would hurt us—were we awake— But since it is playing—kill us, And we are playing—shriek …

So begins this lesser-known Emily Dickinson poem, which also favours the world of dreams over the more painful reality of the waking world. Like many of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems, the American Civil War may have fed into this vision of a life lived best in the protective arms of dreams, rather than the bloody horrors of reality.

7. W. B. Yeats, ‘ He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven ’.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams …

The gist of this poem, one of Yeats’s most popular poems, is straightforward: if I were a rich man, I’d give you the world and all its treasures. If I were a god, I could take the heavenly sky and make a blanket out of it for you. But I’m only a poor man, and obviously the idea of making the sky into a blanket is silly and out of the question, so all I have of any worth are my dreams.

And dreams are delicate and vulnerable – hence ‘Tread softly’.

8. Lola Ridge, ‘ The Dream ’.

I have a dream to fill the golden sheath of a remembered day…. (Air heavy and massed and blue as the vapor of opium… domes fired in sulphurous mist …

Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was born in Ireland but lived much of her adult life in the United States. She’s not read much now, but she was a pioneer of what some call ‘Anarchist poetry’, though her style might be co-opted more broadly under the banner of modernism. This short poem by Ridge shows why she’s worth reading.

9. Langston Hughes, ‘ Dreams ’.

This short, simple lyric by one of the major figures in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s entreats us to hold fast to our dreams, for a life without dreams is barren and cold, like a bird with broken wings that cannot fly.

Dreams, Hughes’ poem suggests, give us freedom and comfort – whether we mean ‘dreams’ in the sense of ‘aspirations’ or ambitions, or those dreams which provide a refuge from waking reality.

10. Pablo Neruda, ‘ Cat’s Dream ’.

As well as being one of the best dream poems, ‘Cat’s Dream’ is also a fine poetic depiction of a cat, describing the animal’s physical appearance but then imagining what a cat’s dreams must be like.

Neruda’s arresting description of the night flowing through the cat’s dreaming mind ‘like dark water’ makes it worth reading on its own – but there are many other things to admire here.

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7 thoughts on “10 of the Best Poems about Dreams and Dreaming”

<3<3<3<3

I love Lola Ridge’s ‘The Dream’ – there’s something striking and profound in the way that she writes.

Wonderful poem, isn’t it? She deserves to be rescued from the literary oblivion into which she’s sunk – as you say, striking and profound. The Internet Archive has some free scans of volumes of her early work :)

Oh wow, I will definitely check these out! Thank you for bringing her to some light :)

Sonnet 43 is mostly read as if it were addressed to the fair youth, however there is no evidence for this in the sonnet. Another possibility is that it is addressed to a deceased infant child, with the reunion in line 13 referring to a reunion in heaven. Two main elements suggest this reading: the naive quality of the language – as if from a father to an infant; the imagery of death in “dead night” (line 11), and the many references to shadow and shade, both of which carried strong connotations of ghosts. The effect of this poem is quite different when read as intended for a lost child.

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, For all the day they view things unrespected; But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed. (4) Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, How would thy shadow’s form form happy show To the clear day with thy much clearer light, When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so! (8) How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made By looking on thee in the living day, When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay. (12) All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

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Posted on Mar 29, 2019

170 Writing Quotes by Famous Authors for Every Occasion

When you're feeling stuck on your novel, an important thing to remember is that we've all been there in the past. That's right — even the J.K Rowling's and Ernest Hemingway's of this world. Which is why it's always a great idea to turn to your most famous peers (and their writing quotes) for inspiration.

Without further ado, here are 170 writing quotes  to guide you through every stage of writing. ( Yes! We've added more since we first published this post! )

The number one piece of advice that most authors have for other authors is to read, read, read. Here’s why.

1. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools ) to write. Simple as that.” — Stephen King

2. “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx

3. “Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Eudora Welty

4. “Read, read, read. Read everything  —  trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner

5. “I kept always two books in my pocket: one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.” — Ernest Gaines

7. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” — Samuel Johnson

8. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.” ― Lisa See

9. “One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.” — Mary B. W. Tabor

The well of inspiration, we’re afraid, often does run dry. Here are the writing quotes to replenish it and, hopefully, remind you that there might be a story idea waiting for you just around the corner of life.

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10. "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison

11. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.” — Orson Scott

12. “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Stephen King

13. “Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.” — Mark Twain

14. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” — George Orwell

15. “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” — Natalie Goldberg

16. “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” — Madeleine L'Engle

17. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

18. “Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.” — William S. Burroughs

19. “Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

20. “The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.” — Susan Sontag

21. “Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” — J.K. Rowling

22. “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “I’m very lucky in that I don’t understand the world yet. If I understood the world, it would be harder for me to write these books.” — Mo Willems

24. “Ideas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important.” — George R.R. Martin

25. “If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” — Dan Poynter

Now, finding your "voice" is not as simple as entering a nationally-televised competition on NBC ( nyuk nyuk! ). Yet your voice will define you as a writer, and these famous writers have plenty of tips and writing quotes for you when it comes to finding it.

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26. “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg

27. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

28. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” —Robert Frost

29. “It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.” — P.D. James

30. “Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.” — Chuck Wendig

31. “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” — Elmore Leonard

32. “Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff

33. “I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” — Virginia Woolf

35. “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor

36. “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.” — Mark Twain

37. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

38. “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.” — Ray Bradbury

39. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” — Ernest Hemingway

40. “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.” — Mark Twain

41. “Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.” — Neil Gaiman

42. “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

43. “It doesn’t matter how many book ideas you have if you can’t finish writing your book.” — Joe Bunting

44. “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” — Margaret Atwood

45. “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.” — Sidney Sheldon

46. “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.” — Jane Austen

47. "Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything really good." — William Faulkner

48. “One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing — writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” — Lawrence Block

49. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” — John Steinbeck

50. “You can fix anything but a blank page.” — Nora Roberts

51. “I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.” — Pearl S. Buck

52. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

Don’t get discouraged if you get this far and you’re thinking that your first draft is rather poor. These writing quotes are reminders that it’s just part of the process.

53. “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett

54. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk

55. “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams

56. “The first draft of everything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

57. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert

58. “I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.” — Anne Tyler

59. “I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.” — John Green

60. “Be willing to write really badly.” — Jennifer Egan

61. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.” — Stephen King

62. “I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” — Tom Clancy

63. “Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy

64. “You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury

65. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.” — Isaac Asimov

66. “Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.” — Ray Bradbury

67. “You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.” ― Octavia E. Butler

68. “I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it.” — Chinua Achebe

69. “The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.” — Augusten Burroughs

70. “It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.” — Gerald Brenan

71. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin

72. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless — there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” — Ernest Hemingway

73. “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

74. “The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying ‘Faire et se taire’ from Flaubert. Which I translate for myself as ‘Shut up and get on with it.’” — Helen Simpson

75. “I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from; I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down.” — J.K. Rowling

76. “Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer.” — Ray Bradbury

77. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” — Virginia Woolf

78. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“Write drunk, edit sober” might be one of the most famous writing quotes about editing, but we can’t all outdrink Ernest Hemingway. Which is why these other words of wisdom and writing quotes exist!

79. “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” ― Jodi Picoult

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80. “When your story is ready for a rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” — Stephen King

81. “The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.” — Dominick Dunne

82. “Editing might be a bloody trade, but knives aren’t the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.” — Blake Morrison

83. “The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.” — E.B. White

84. “You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” — Arthur Plotnik

85. “Half my life is an act of revision.” — John Irving

86. “I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” — Truman Capote

87. “It is perfectly okay to write garbage — as long as you edit brilliantly.” — C. J. Cherryh

88. “I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” ― Don Roff

89. “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'.” — Mark Twain

90. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” ― Dr. Seuss

91. “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” — Henry David Thoreau

92. “I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” — Bernard Malamud

93. “No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.” — Russell Lynes

94. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” — Annie Dillard

95. “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.” — H.G. Wells

96. “A writer is a world trapped in a person.” — Victor Hugo

97. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann

98. “People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.” — R.L. Stine

99. “As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.” ― Ernest Hemingway

100. “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” — Gustave Flaubert

101. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — Sylvia Plath

102. “I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself — click — back into that world.” — Stephen King

103. “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” — William Carlos Williams

104. “Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.” — Gore Vidal

105. “For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.” — Catherine Drinker Bowen

106. “The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.” — Thomas Mann

107. “Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” — T.S. Eliot

108. “Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.” — Margaret Chittenden

109. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” — Eugene Ionesco

110. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

111. “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.” — Roald Dahl

112. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” — Gloria Steinem

From cavemen to our modern day in the 21st-century, we have written our joys and sorrows throughout history. What compels us to write? Here’s what some of the most beloved writers we know have to say.

113. “I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” — Anne Frank

114. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — Anais Nin

115. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

116. “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.” — Zadie Smith

117. “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron

118. “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams

119. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” — Aldous Huxley

120. “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

121. “Writers live twice.” —  Natalie Goldberg

122. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill

123. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” — Oscar Wilde

124. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” — Ray Bradbury

125. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass .” ― Anton Chekhov

126. “My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” — Anton Chekhov

127. “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

128. “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” — Stephen King

129. “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” — Mark Twain

130. “Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don’t let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won’t matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.” — Esther Freud

131. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. [...] All they do is show you've been to college.” — Kurt Vonnegut

132. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” — Herman Melville

133. “Write drunk, edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway

134. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” — Mark Twain

135. “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.” — Neil Gaiman

136. “Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.” — Jane Yolen

137. “Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” — Jules Renard

138. “My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand, writing what I call transparent prose. I’ve failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant.” — Ken Follett

139. “And one of [the things you learn as you get older] is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

140. “ Part 1. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English — it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in . Part 2. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. Part 3. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” — Mark Twain

“You miss 100% of the shots that you never take — Wayne Gretsky,” as Michael Scott once said. In tribute to this sentiment, these writing quotes help show why it’s important not to let failure or rejection get you down.

141. “You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.” — John Wooden

142. “Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil — but there is no way around them.” — Isaac Asimov

143. “Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn’t feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That’s my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.” — Jennifer Salaiz

144. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” — Sylvia Plath

145. “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” — Harper Lee

147. “I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I’m going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.” — James Lee Burke

148. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.” — Barbara Kingsolver

149. “To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.” — Anita Shreve

150. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” — Neil Gaiman

151. “The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.” — William Faulkner

152. “I think that you have to believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours — so enjoy the view.” — Michael York

153. “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

154. “I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.” — Anita Diamant

155. “I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.” — Louise Brown

156. “I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn’t. I have drawers full of — or I did have — drawers full of rejection slips.” — Fred Saberhagen

157. “An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.” — Irwin Shaw

158. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.” — C. S. Lewis

Why does writing matter? If there’s anyone who might know the answer, it’s the people who write — and continue to write, despite adverse circumstances. Here are a few pennies for their thoughts.

159. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf

160. “If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.” — Wally Lamb

161. “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood

162. “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.” — Martin Luther

163. “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

164. “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — David Foster Wallace

165. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” — Philip Pullman

166. “All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life.” — Gene Weingarten

167. “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.” — Peter Handke

168. “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” — Tom Clancy

169. “If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” — Lillian Hellman

170. “Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously.” — Lev Grossman

Of course, writing quotes by themselves won't write the book for you — you alone have that power. However, we hope that this post has helped inspire you in some way! If you're looking for more in-depth resources, you can check out these guides:

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Have a favorite quote that we missed? If you know of more cool quotes by writers, write them in the comments!

2 responses

Brian Welte says:

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Here's a quote I absolutely adore: "The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere" [Quote from Gustave Flaubert]

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Do you use your dreams as inspiration?

I don’t usually have inspiring dreams – at least nothing I could write about but a few days ago I woke up after a long event-filled dream.

I had gone to bed early as I was feeling under the weather.

Instead of the sleepless night, I feared I might have had, I actually slept for almost ten full hours.

This is not like me as I usually get about six – to seven hours and any occasional early night is usually spent wide awake reading, or listening to audio-books.

This night was different and I woke up with my earphones still in my ears and my kindle under the covers with me.

The book I had been listening to was a non-fiction book and not particularly exciting as it was something I was reading for educational purposes rather than entertainment.

The book had simply played on until the end.

FULL-LENGTH DREAMS

I frequently have quite long drawn out dreams, but the dream I remembered after this night was like a full-length movie.

What was a bit strange was that I personally was in the dream.

What was even stranger was that I was watching the dream at the same time.

But, what was really, really strange was that the ‘full-length movie’ I was watching in the dream was a dystopian one.

I DREAM OF DYSTOPIA

The people in my dream society were divided into two distinct types with a large majority of one very particular type of person (in appearance and personality) and a tiny minority of others.

I was part of the minority of people and was trying to get to a place that I personally have never visited in my life unless you count television and movies, in which case I have visited this particular location quite often.

The dream was a lot more detailed than I am describing here, but I won’t get into those details because since that dream I have been experiencing a very strong urge to write a book based on the dream.

PLAYING TO MY STRENGTHS

Except for a film treatment which never actually got made I have never before written in the dystopian genre, having decided long ago to play to my creative strengths.

I don’t feel as experienced, or confident in this genre as I do in others, despite the fact that it is one of my favourite genres – to read.

Yet my dystopian dream story is turning into one of those ideas that never quite goes away.

My thoughts keep turning to this dream, even during swimming, which is one of the activities I use to ’empty’ my mind and relax.

In fact, I am thinking that another few hundred lengths down the swimming pool just might finish this story…

So what should I do? Take a chance and write something completely different? or not?

While considering the idea I googled ‘ books based on dreams’ and found this site  which lists Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight , Stephen King’s Misery, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein among other books which were inspired by their author’s dream.

These authors seem to have been very inspired and highly motivated by their dreams and I must say following their dreams has certainly paid off for them.

I am still not sure – my gut is telling me I should write it but my brain is telling me not to waste my time on a project I may not be able to finish. I usually go with my gut, but…

Given my current indecisiveness what I will probably do is write a short outline and see how far that gets me.  In the meantime, I will dream on…

Best wishes

If your dreams don’t inspire you,  click here  for some other ways to be inspired.

For some quick and easy creative writing exercises to help you get new ideas click here.

If you are feeling a bit blocked click here to learn how to beat the block.

PRACTICAL CREATIVE WRITING EXERCISES

Suffering from writer’s block? Stuck for ideas?

You won’t be able to stop writing because these beautiful and inspiring exercises will banish your writing block right now.

Never Be Stuck Again!

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What, to the Writer, Are Dreams?

Lauren acampora on the mythic links between dream life and creativity.

“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.” –Joseph Campbell

One morning, when I was younger, I gave a detailed description of my previous night’s dream to my mother. When I finished, she said, “I’m going to tell you something. Don’t ever share your dreams with anyone except your spouse. It’s boring to listen to other people’s dreams.”

I was offended at first. How could anyone, not to mention my own mother, fail to find my dreams as fascinating as I did? But of course she was right; it’s almost always deadly to hear other people talk about their dreams. As a rule, dreams die in the glare of the waking world, their shimmering aura evaporating in the harsh air outside the psyche. And yet, paradoxically, it’s the emotional aura of dreams that makes them feel so urgently worth sharing in the first place.

Needless to say, I didn’t listen to my mother. That is, I still share my dreams promiscuously—just not verbally.

Like so many other writers and artists, I employ dreams in my creative work. They’re an engine, a lending library. It’s a thrill to awake with a strange, arresting image in mind, or still grasping the thread of an allegorical dream story. Sometimes, a vision or scenario arrives as a package deal: the story is encased within the vision, packed up tight with a certain mood. For me, entire short stories have sprung from such vision: a woman alone in a pool, a finger touching a brain, a blindfolded child. A haunting dream of orange curtains in a hotel room has rolled into an entire novel (in which orange hotel curtains do not ever appear). And the power and mystery of dreams themselves inspired my novel The Paper Wasp , in which the narrator illustrates—and ultimately enters—her vivid, seemingly premonitory dreams.

There’s no shortage of literature and art that we know to have sprung from dreams. As legend has it, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge transcribed the first lines of “Kubla Khan” from a dream; the idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in her sleep; Robert Louis Stevenson conceived of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a consumptive fever dream; Stephen King came up with the idea for Misery while napping on a plane ; William Styron had a dream that inspired Sophie’s Choice . One of the most prolific dream miners of all was Edgar Allen Poe, who used his frequent nightmares in much of his work. And famously, Paul McCartney dreamed the tune for the song “Yesterday.” Upon waking, he asked his friends if they knew it. “It’s a good little tune,” he said, “but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.”

Dreams can feel like messages from another place, so it’s no surprise that many ancient cultures believed dreams to be transmissions of divine knowledge. The Ancient Egyptians considered dreams to be oracular and held vivid dreamers in high regard. They practiced dream incubation and lucid dreaming, and employed dream guides called the “Masters of Secret Things” who lived in dream temples. The Greeks, too, incubated dreams, and thought that gods came to dreamers through a keyhole to deliver messages. The Aboriginal Australians and the Iroquois started their day by sharing dreams, which were considered a source of guidance for both the individual and the community. The Hindu religion, too, believes that in dreams one is given a glimpse of Vishnu, whose own dreaming mind creates our reality. It isn’t difficult to understand where such beliefs come from if you’ve ever dreamed of reading a book, sentence after lucid, elaborate sentence. “I couldn’t have written it,” you might think, “because I dreamt it.”

Brain science validates this phenomenon. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep, when the frontal lobe, the executive area of the brain, is shut down. Dreams are the mysterious activity of another part of the brain, beneath the scrutiny of the frontal lobe. Neurologically speaking, we really are receiving transmissions from a foreign entity; the unconscious, unobserved self slips through the keyhole when the guard is off duty.

Even during waking hours, the human brain is divided: the executive-desk frontal lobe and the inscrutable, intuitive limbic system are strangers to each other. In sleep, they are incommunicado. Because of this deep rift, the great majority of our dreams go unremembered, except on a buried emotional level. It’s difficult, even paradoxical, to try to bear total witness to them, akin to pinning down the present moment, halting the slippage of time. Just as the present can only be considered in retrospect, the unconscious mind can only be discerned via the remembered scraps of dreams. Any glimmers of awareness that may come during sleep, when a dream is fleetingly apprehended, are instances of the conscious half of the brain briefly observing and translating the activity of the submerged half: interpreting the enigmatic message of a stranger. These glimmers are rare and fleeting, occurring only during the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states, the liminal states between wakefulness and sleep.

In siphoning dreams for their work, writers and artists are tapping a valuable well. Dream logic and imagery carries an uncanny, allegorical quality that resonates deeply with readers and audiences. And it’s possible that dream recall actually enhances artistic output during waking hours. Scientific studies have confirmed a correlation between dream recall and creativity; those who recall dreams actually perform better on creativity evaluations. This may be because creative people are naturally better at recalling their dreams. It’s a chicken or egg situation: do creative people have more vivid and memorable dreams because they are innately creative, or can a brain become more creative through strengthening dream recall? Whatever the case, making use of dreams in art is a powerful way to reflect our foreign selves back to ourselves, while projecting that mystery self out to the world as archetypal image and story—dream as personalized myth, myth as depersonalized dream.

For writers, plugging into the unconscious provides a direct line to the human imagination in all its splendor and darkness. Indeed, in the midst of composing, it’s often unclear where the words are coming from. Sentences and imagery sometimes bubble up from a hidden well that surprises the conscious, transcribing mind. Some writers will tell you that they write in order to exorcise their demons, cleanse their psyches, to bring their fears and darkness into the light. Some will tell you that it’s better than therapy.

Writing at full tilt can be a euphoric state, tantamount to lucid dreaming. It’s half-awareness—one foot in, one foot out—a balance on the brink of consciousness. It’s not just in dreams that we can experience the ecstasy of flight and the exhilaration of omnipotence, but also when writing, when the words are flowing, the images appearing. Just as in a lucid dream, this exhilaration is paired with the knowledge that it can’t last, that it’s a temporary spell. Soon, we’ll become too aware of flying, and the spell will break and drop us to the ground. Still, we endeavor to capture and recapture this ecstasy of creative freedom, the ability to travel lightly anywhere at will, the bliss of floating to the treetops.

If writing fiction is analogous to dreaming, the experience of reading fiction can be, too. When we’re reading, another person is able to intrude into our psyches through the use of words alone, remotely projecting imagery onto the screens of our minds, suffusing them with atmosphere and mood. We are, in a way, sharing a dream with a stranger. And fiction, at its best, places a mirror before us, evoking terror and wonder. It affects us on an emotional level beyond language, and brings a frisson of recognition. There’s a momentary astonishment to encounter the familiar within the strange, something of our own inner lives on the page. There’s the eerie sense that the author has somehow entered and seen into us. The best art carries this sense of inevitability, of allegory, myth, dream—a truth that has always been there, that we already know in some deep part of ourselves.

This flare of astonishment is arguably the purpose of art. It’s the sudden thinning of the distance between us, the erosion of barriers that have been built and propped up by our conscious, waking lives. Like a flash of lightning, great art illuminates the human landscape in its breathtaking entirety and shows that the barriers are flimsy, false, only temporarily there. All at once, we are taken outside ourselves and given a glimpse of the Jungian collective unconscious, the subliminal wholeness of life, the enveloping dream of Vishnu. What is the purpose of all art, if not to puncture the illusion of fragmentation, to reveal the commonality of human experience, to return us—if briefly—to those collective waters?

__________________________________

The Paper Wasp   by Lauren Acampora is out now via Grove Atlantic.

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Lecture Notes: Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" [1907]

D) Freud’s answer to the second question, the reasons for the effect of literature. We take no pleasure in hearing the fantasies of real people, so why do the fantasies of creative writers give us such inordinate pleasure?

E) Summary: Consequence of this theory for definition of creative writer.

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Part 1, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 2, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 3, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 4, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

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Part 3, “The Uncanny”

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“The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay summary: “the creative writer and daydreaming”.

In this essay, Freud explicitly examines the relationship between literary analysis and psychoanalysis. The essay begins with the memorable and oft-quoted line: “We may perhaps say that every child at play behaves like a writer” (25). He then adds that “the opposite of play is not seriousness–it is reality” (26). Freud continues by explaining that rather than forgoing the pleasure we once took in playing in adolescence, humans replace play with fantasy. People’s fantasies are less easily observable than children’s play, and adults are generally ashamed of these secret desires.

In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud has learned that healthy and neurotic people both fantasize, but happy people do not, only dissatisfied ones, as “every fantasy [is] wish fulfillment, correcting the unhappy reality” (28). Fantasies are either ambitious or erotic. Fantasies also inhabit three time periods: the present impression, which has aroused the desire; the past memory of an earlier experience; and the future fulfillment of this desire. For instance, an orphaned youth might fantasize about gaining employment and marrying into a wealthy family to repossess themselves of a happy childhood. Fantasies proliferate prior to a lapse into neurosis or psychosis.

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63 Best Creativity Quotes To Transform the World

Creativity is a powerful force — a dynamic spark that drives innovation and progress.

It’s not just about creating art or producing novel ideas — it’s about envisioning new solutions to old problems, thinking outside the box, and daring to dream of a better future.

Whether it's an artist using their work to shed light on societal issues, a scientist thinking creatively to address environmental challenges, or a community leader innovating ways to uplift their neighborhood — creativity is at the heart of making a positive difference.

In fact, some of the world's most significant advancements and impactful initiatives have come from those who dared to think creatively — innovators, artists, and thinkers.

And we’ve gathered their words of wisdom here today.

Their insights illustrate the importance of creativity in forging a path towards a brighter, more just world.

These quotes will inspire you to unleash your own creativity and imagine new possibilities for a better future.

Whether you’re an artist, a problem solver, or anyone seeking inspiration to think more creatively, these quotes will light the spark within you. Dive in and let these powerful words fuel your creative spirit:

Best Quotes About Creativity

Famous quotes.

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.” — Maya Angelou

“Creativity is the language we use to communicate the urgency of our dreams for a better future.” — Audre Lorde

“Our dreams may seem impossible, but our creativity can turn them into reality.” — Malala Yousafzai

“The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.” — Virginia Woolf

“The power of our dreams and the creativity we employ can break the chains of injustice and oppression.” — Desmond Tutu

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” — Mary Lou Cook

“The creative adult is the child who survived.” — ​​Ursula Le Guin

“Creativity is the heartbeat of activism, and dreams are the fuel that drives our determination.” — Jamie Margolin

“The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.” — Pablo Picasso

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.’” — Arthur Rimbaud

“Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.” — Max Ernst

Inspirational Quotes

“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while working.” — Henri Matisse

“Creativity is our most powerful tool to shape the world we want to live in.” — Isra Hirsi

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” — Neil Gaiman

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” — Ira Glass

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” — Sarah Ban Breathnach

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.” — Maya Angelou

“Dreams are the seeds of change. Nothing ever grows without a seed, and nothing ever changes without a dream.” — Debby Boone

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Our dreams and creativity can rewrite the narratives of our future.” — Mari Copeny

“A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life.” — Elizabeth Gilbert

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

“I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.” — Maya Angelou

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.” — Rita Mae Brown

On Imagination

“That’s what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.” — Walt Disney

“Everything you can imagine is real.” — Pablo Picasso

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will.” — George Bernard Shaw

“Imagination is the source of all human achievement.” — Sir Ken Robinson

“Creativity begins to die when we fail to celebrate curiosity. We reward students for getting the right answer, but not for asking good questions. We promote managers for delivering results, but not for developing new ideas. Encouraging imagination is the mother of invention.” — Adam Grant

“Creativity fuels our imagination, and our imagination fuels our dreams of a better world.” — Greta Thunberg

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” — Toni Cade Bambara

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.” — James Baldwin

“Art is where what we survive survives.” — John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

“You cannot teach creativity — how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” — Mario Vargas Llosa

“The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.” — Anaïs Nin

“Art helps us envision a world in which all of our goals for society are right before us. Use your creativity to bolster and expand your attention. You’re in it for the long haul.” — Imani Barbarin

“We need musicians and storytellers to bring healing to our culture, and we need that now, more than ever.” — Chloé S. Valdary

“Some of [my memoir] — perhaps too much — has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it — and perhaps the best of it — is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. 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.” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Art isn’t optional for humans.” — John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed  

“Art is a group of highly sensitive people reporting back what reality is like for them.” — Pete Holmes

“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.” — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

On Innovation

“You can be creative in anything — in math, science, engineering, philosophy — as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.” — Sir Ken Robinson

“Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.” — Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” — Mary Shelley

“There is no innovation and creativity without failure.” — Brené Brown

“Dreams are the starting point of every revolution, and creativity fuels its fire.” — Gloria Steinem

“You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.” — Richard Bach

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” — Brené Brown , Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Short Creativity Quotes

“Creativity takes courage.” — Henri Matisse

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” — George Scialabbe

“Creativity is the way I share my soul with the world.” — Brené Brown , The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” — C.S. Lewis

“Dreaming without action is merely a fantasy. Channel your creativity into real change.” — Jamie Margolin

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” — Gustave Flaubert

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” — Oprah Winfrey

“Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” — Edward de Bono

“You can’t schedule creativity, it just happens.” — Brittany Cabriales

“The dreamers are the saviors of the world.” — James Allen

“Our dreams are the canvas, and our creativity is the paint that brings them to life.” — Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

On Creating

“Take your broken heart, make it into art.” — Carrie Fisher

“People who live in fear of others stealing their ideas generally don’t have many good ideas. Creativity is abundant. Execution is scarce. What prevails is not the best idea but the best implementation.” — Adam Grant

“Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” — Bruce Garrabrandt

“Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work. If you pick the wrong noun to aspire to, you’ll be stuck with the wrong verb, too. When people use the word creative” as a job title, it not only falsely divides the world into ‘creatives’ and ‘non-creatives,’ but also implies that the work of a ‘creative’ is ‘being creative.’ But being creative is never an end; it is a means to something else. Creativity is just a tool.” — Austin Kleon, in a blog post

“Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear. There’s a Sex Pistols song with the lyric, ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.’ That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.” — Austin Kleon, in a blog post

“Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.” — Salvador Dali

On Being Creative

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“I dream in fire but work in clay.” — Arthur Machen

“Overthinking the process will kill any career in the creative space. You just have to do, not think.” — Casey Neistat

“My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.” — Miles Davis

“Sometimes the creativity is in the rest.” — Joshua Kissi

“Resting is not a waste of time. It’s an investment in well-being. Relaxing is not a sign of laziness. It’s a source of energy. Breaks are not a distraction. They’re a chance to refocus attention. Play is not a frivolous activity. It’s a path to connection and creativity.” — Adam Grant 

“Rest nurtures creativity, which nurtures activity. Activity nurtures rest, which sustains creativity. Each draws from and contributes to the other.” — Kim John Payne

More Quotes

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.” — Sophia Loren

“Creativity is problem-solving. Creativity is progress. Creativity is a tool. Harness yours.” — Alex Lieberman

“I’ve been having a long debate with myself about whether human creativity can exist absent problems to solve. I don’t think it can. Even if the problems are self-imposed (which they often are, at least in the beginning of the process) I think all creativity is problem solving.” — Hank Green ‍ ‍

“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.” — Anaïs Nin

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” — Bruce Lee

“Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, ‘Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.’” — Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

“But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.” — Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

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What Freud Said About Writing Fiction

"The creative writer does the same as the child at play," and other quips

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"Writing is a little door," Susan Sontag wrote in her diary . "Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won't come through."

Sigmund Freud—key figure in the making of consumer culture , deft architect of his own myth , modern plaything —spent a fair amount of his career exploring the psychology of dreams . In 1908, he turned to the intersection of fantasies and creativity, and penned a short essay titled "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," eventually republished in the anthology The Freud Reader ( public library ). Though his theories have been the subject of much controversy and subsequent revision, they remain a fascinating formative framework for much of the modern understanding of the psyche.

Predictably, Freud begins by tracing the subject matter to its roots in childhood, stressing, as Anaïs Nin eloquently did—herself trained in psychoanalysis—the importance of emotional investment in creative writing :

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child's 'play' from 'phantasying.' The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.

He then considers, as Henry Miller did in his famous creative routine three decades later, the time scales of the creative process:

The relation of phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it ware, between three times—the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject's major wishes. From here it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and now it creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus, past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

He synthesizes the parallel between creative writing and play:

[A] piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

He goes on to explore the secretive nature of our daydreams, suggesting that an element of shame keeps us from sharing them with others—perhaps what Jack Kerouac meant when he listed the unspeakable visions of the individual as one of his iconic beliefs and techniques for prose —and considers how the creative writer transcends that to achieve pleasure in the disclosure of these fantasies:

How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus , or a fore-pleasure , to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer's enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame.

For more famous insights on writing, see Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for a great story , David Ogilvy's 10 no-bullshit tips , Henry Miller's 11 commandments , Jack Kerouac's 30 beliefs and techniques , John Steinbeck's six pointers , and Susan Sontag's synthesized learnings .

This post also appears on Brain Pickings , an Atlantic partner site.

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Who said what now? —

Sony apologizes for interview it says “misrepresented” a last of us creator, move comes after druckmann publicly disavowed some quotes: "this is not quite what i said.".

Kyle Orland - May 29, 2024 4:51 pm UTC

Sony has taken down an interview with Naughty Dog Studio Head Neil Druckmann ( Uncharted , The Last of Us ) that the company now says contains "several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent his perspective and values." The surprising move comes after Druckmann took the extreme measure of publicly questioning a portion of the PR interview by posting a lengthy transcript that conflicted with the heavily edited version Sony posted online.

The odd media saga began last Thursday, when Sony published the interview ( archive here ) under the heading "The Evolution of Storytelling Across Mediums." The piece was part of the Creative Entertainment Vision section of Sony's corporate site, a PR-driven concept exploring how Sony will "seamlessly connect multi-layered worlds where physical and virtual realities overlap to deliver limitless Kanto—through creativity and technology—working with creators." Whatever that means.

Druckmann's short interview started attracting attention almost immediately, primarily due to Druckmann's apparent promotion of using AI tools in game development. Such tools "will allow us to create nuanced dialogues and characters, expanding creative possibilities," Druckmann is quoted as saying. "AI is really going to revolutionize how content is being created, although it does bring up some ethical issues we need to address."

Not so fast...

By Friday, though, Druckmann ended a months-long drought of social media posting by noting that, in at least one case, the words posted by Sony were "not quite what I said. In editing my rambling answers in my recent interview with Sony, some of my words, context, and intent were unfortunately lost."

As evidence, Druckmann posted this "rambling" 457-word response to a question about a "personal vision or dream project" he hoped to create:

Well, I've been very lucky, in that I've already had that. I got the chance to make several of my dream projects. I am working on a new one right now. And it's maybe the most excited I've been for a project yet. I can't talk about it or our bosses will get very mad at me. And I guess in general, there is something happening now that I think is very cool. Which is there's a new appreciation for gaming that I've never seen before. Like when I was growing up, gaming was more of a kid's thing. Now it's clearly for everyone. But it's like, if you're a gamer, you know about the potential of games, and non-gamers, they don't really know what they're missing out on. But my hope was, when we made The Last of Us as a TV show that we could change that. And why I became so involved with it. I wanted so badly for it to be good, because I wanted this to happen, which is like someone who will watch the show and really like it. And fall in love with those characters the way that we have fallen in love with those characters and their story. And then realize at the end, "Wait, that's based on a video game?" and then go and check out the game and just see the wealth of narratives and everything that's happening in games. So now I feel like there's kind of a spotlight on gaming. And you know, Fallout just came out. And that's a big success for Amazon. And I find that really exciting. Not because games need to be movies, or they need to be TV shows, but I think it just kind of opens the eyes of a bunch of people that just weren't aware of the kind of experiences that exist in games. I think right now we've hit a tipping point where it's about to take off where people realize, "Oh my God, there's all these incredible moving experiences in games!" So, I'm not only excited for this game that we're making—and it's, it's something really fresh for us—but I'm also excited to see how the world reacts to it. Because of The Last of Us , and the success of the show, people even outside of gaming are looking at us to see what it is that we put out next. I'm very excited to see what the reaction for this thing will be—and l've already said too much about it. I'll stop there. So, you're asking me for my dream projects. I've been very lucky to have worked on my favorite games with incredible collaborators and I'm very thankful for them.

For reference, here is the 127-word summary of that answer posted by Sony:

I've been lucky to work on several dream projects and am currently excited about a new one, which is perhaps the most thrilling yet. There's a growing appreciation for gaming that transcends all age groups, unlike when I was growing up. This shift is highlighted by our venture into television with The Last of Us , which I hoped would bridge the gap between gamers and non-gamers. The show's success has spotlighted gaming, illustrating the rich, immersive experiences it offers. This visibility excites me not only for our current project but for the broader potential of gaming to captivate a global audience. I'm eager to see how this new game resonates, especially following the success of The Last of Us , as it could redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming.

While the gist of Druckmann's original answer is more or less preserved, the condensed version loses a lot of the specific details and flavor Druckmann highlighted in his answer. The edited version also inserts some key phrases and ideas that Druckmann didn't use at all, such as his supposed hope that his new project "could redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming."

Though we don't know how much Druckmann's other answers were clipped or amended in the editing process, Druckmann's public annoyance with the edits was apparently enough to get Sony's attention. Sometime after Tuesday night, the PlayStation-maker replaced the public interview with the following message:

In re-reviewing our recent interview with Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann, we have found several significant errors and inaccuracies that don't represent his perspective and values (including topics such as animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects). We apologize to Neil for misrepresenting his words and for any negative impact this interview might have caused him and his team. In coordination with Naughty Dog and SIE, we have removed the interview.

Journalists often edit interview responses for concision and clarity, but this interview skips the usual step of noting the existence of those kinds of edits near the top of the piece. And while press releases often contain executive quotes that have been carefully crafted in consultation with PR professionals, there was no indication in this article that the responses here were anything other than Druckmann's own thoughts and words.

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