Quotes from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“To the extent that self-expression does broadcast and reinforce a person's character, it clarifies a link between art, eccentricity, and mental illness. The more like ourselves we become, the odder we become.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“change: disabling his e-mail so that he can check it only once a day at the local cybercafé (where he has to pay high rates for on-line time).”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“Thanks to the Internet, there is even a new variety of continuously updated on-line memoir sometimes called the blog (from Web-log). Thousands of authors simply write their diaries directly onto Web pages for the rest of the world to read. Why do people want to recount their lives? What”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“The drive to write produces a first draft; it is the drive to write well that produces the second, third, twentieth. Thus”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“Most agree that a useful definition of creative work is that it includes a combination of novelty and value. Creativity requires novelty because tried-and-true solutions are not creative, even if they are ingenious and useful. And creative works must be valuable (useful or illuminating to at least some members of the population) because a work that is merely odd is not creative. This two-pronged definition of creativity also provides an explanation of why the creative can lie close to the insane (unusual but valueless behavior).”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“When others' obsessions are not ours, we are sad for them, and we talk of how empty their lives will be if they don't achieve their empty goal: the gymnastics prize, the firm partnership. But there is a monomania in which it is the focus, the sense of transport, that is the real pleasure.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

“Another difference between amateur and professional writers, almost by definition, is that the latter more successfully engage their audience. It is partly a question of skill, but more often a matter of goals. Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agendas enough so that they are of interest to others. Is this position the same as Freud's famous dictum that artists take unacceptable drives and present them in an acceptable way?”
― quote from The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

Popular quotes

“That's brilliant."
"I thought so. But I'm glad you agree. It will make this journey much more pleasant if you are impressed with my brilliance.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from Vessel

“every time you find yourself making a judgment immediately upon observing—in fact, even if you don’t think you are, and even if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It will save you from many errors in perception.”
― Maria Konnikova, quote from Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

“Everyone was always in such a rush to shoot forward that they never took the time to look back. Which was a mistake. If you wanted to avoid snags, kinks, knots, and cuts, you had to "keep your mind on your line," as the saying went.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Earth Unaware

“In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day - which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie - says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law

“Because the one thing I hate about hope - the one thing I despise about it, that no one ever seems to admit about it- is that suddenly having hope is the easiest route to sudden hopelessness there is.”
― Danny Wallace, quote from Charlotte Street

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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