Quotes About Inspiration

The crown of literature is poetry.

There's an old saying that great writing is simple but not easy, and so it is. The search for that one plain but inobvious [SIC] word that will do the work of five, the agony of untangling a complex idea that has become a mess of phrases in the writer's mind, the willingness to keep doing it over and over again until it is right--all of that plus some luck yields prose so clear that it seems a child could have written it.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.… This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built, when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon.

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. from "Cutting Loose

If you find it difficult to write, lower your standards.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn't like.

The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see," Winston Churchill once said.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Let's face it, writing is hell.

Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.

Pharisees—men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when it came to them.

Let's ask D. L. Moody." Another objected and said, "D. L. Moody does not have a monopoly of the Holy Spirit." "No, he does not," was the reply, "but the Holy Spirit has a monopoly on him.

Once he gave her a Rothko book—an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can't write unless you read.

The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.