8 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Creativity

Orson Scott Card quotes on creativity

4. [It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because I cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would have the effect it had on the audience. While most people ignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives without reading it or anything else by me, there was still a surprisingly large group who responded to the story with some fervency.

10. The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that I'm just plain not talented or skilful enough to write. That's the dilemma every storyteller faces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

36. We have to strike a delicate balance. Isolate him enough that he remains creative -otherwise he'll adopt the system here and well lose him. At the same time, we need to make sure he keeps a strong ability to lead.

46. We don't think like other children, do we...? We don't talk like other children. And above all, we don't write like other children.

150. How can I figure out something that isn't just the logical conclusion of things that human beings have already figured out and written somewhere? You think of things all the time I'm trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that humans beings have never even tried to ask.

185. In [his] mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense all because they can't all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they're needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgments, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. We knew everything there was to know before... Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.

281. You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false

1100. You need to remember that what you're dealing with here is the ideas I had when I was 16 that I'm putting in my fiction now.