Top 8 Quotes by Alice Weaver Flaherty

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

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.

Alice Weaver Flaherty

Writing, Men, Color

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ.

Alice Weaver Flaherty

Neurology, Should, Psychiatry

A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful or influential in a particular social setting.

Alice Weaver Flaherty

Learning, Ideas, Creative

Journal of Comparative Neurology 493:147-153, p. 147, 2005.

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

Alice Weaver Flaherty

Dog, Sleep, Writing

Alice Weaver Flaherty (2015). “The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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.

Alice Weaver Flaherty

Writing, Blood, People