Creativity Quote by Terri Windling

Windling’s plea is less a cozy bookish mantra than an economic reality check disguised as encouragement. She frames reading as an active civic act: not just consuming stories, but sustaining the conditions that allow new ones to exist. The line “keep trying new writers” is the quiet provocation. It calls out a cultural habit of defaulting to the familiar - the bestseller list, the comfort-author, the algorithmic “if you liked.” Windling asks readers to risk disappointment, to treat curiosity as a practice rather than a personality trait.

The quote’s engine is its unromantic insistence on purchase. “Go out and buy it” lands with the bluntness of a working artist who understands how fragile the pipeline is between talent and visibility. In creative industries, “fresh new material” doesn’t arrive because it’s morally deserved; it arrives because someone funded the experiment. Windling collapses the distance between reader taste and market outcomes, implying that what gets published is partly a mirror of what readers are willing to underwrite.

There’s subtext, too, about gatekeeping and stagnation: if audiences only reward established names, the field narrows, risks calcify, and “new” becomes a marketing adjective slapped on recycled formulas. Coming from an artist steeped in speculative and mythic traditions, the argument is pointed: imaginative culture stays alive only when audiences feed its next generation. She’s not scolding. She’s recruiting.