Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

There is a quiet provocation in Windling putting “for me” up front, then doubling down with “really,” as if she can already hear the inevitable protest from a screen-soaked culture. The line isn’t a manifesto against film so much as a defense of a particular kind of power: the kind that happens inside the reader. Film is overwhelming by design, a medium that delivers faces, lighting, tempo, and emotion pre-packaged at 24 frames per second. Writing, at its best, refuses to do that. It withholds the image so the mind has to build it, and that act of co-creation can hit harder than anything projected.

Coming from an artist known for mythic storytelling, the subtext is about sovereignty. The written word doesn’t just depict a world; it drafts a spellbook for entering one. It also preserves ambiguity. Where film often resolves choices (this actor, this voice, this castle), prose can let a character’s “look” remain porous, personal, even contradictory. That openness is not a bug; it’s the mechanism.

There’s context in the timing, too: the modern hierarchy that treats film and TV as the “main” narrative engines and books as raw material for adaptation. Windling flips that hierarchy with a calm insistence. “Stronger” here is not about budget or reach; it’s about intimacy, about how language can slip past the senses and lodge in memory like a private obsession.