Quotes About Inspiration

Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.

Can you help me understand . . . ?" you offer the role of advisor. "Let's work on how we might . . . ." invites a partnership. "I wonder whether it's possible to . . . ." throws out a challenge, one which offers the other person the potential role of hero.

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another. It is the only means.

I am who I am because somebody loved me.

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Let us move into the New Year with a great sense of the thrill of living.

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man's face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It's the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

Writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

It takes courage to be creative. Just as soon as you have an idea, you become a minority of one.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.

in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Here's to opening and upward... and to yourself and up with you and up with and up with laughing.