Quotes About Inspiration

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege.

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves.

Watch for the people whose eyes light up when you talk about your dream. Those are the people you keep.

Wendell Berry warned, "To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain.

He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn't so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants to lead you. Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

There is no time or space where inspiration comes from—and also no competition, no ego, no limitations. There is only the stubbornness of the idea itself, refusing to stop searching until it has found an equally stubborn collaborator. (Or multiple collaborators, as the case may be.) Work with that stubbornness. Work with it as openly and trustingly and diligently as you can.

Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?

I am going to spend as much time as I can creating delightful things out of my existence, because that's what brings me awake and that's what brings me alive.

What I'm saying is this: If my plan is to sit around waiting for another such unadulterated and impassioned creative visitation, I may be waiting for a very long time. So I don't sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me—waiting to see if I'm truly serious about this line of work.

The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living.

inspiration comes from another world, you see, and it speaks a language entirely unlike my own, so sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying.

Your creativity is way older than you are, way older than any of us. Your very body and your very being are perfectly designed to live in collaboration with inspiration, and inspiration is still trying to find a way to you - the same way it hunted down your ancestors.

The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too. That's the deal. I trust it; it trusts me.

that's what you have to do at the beginning; everybody imitates before they can innovate.

I choose to trust that inspiration is always nearby, the whole time I'm working, trying its damnedest to impart assistance. [...] Sometimes we have trouble understanding each other. But inspiration is still sitting there right beside me, and it is trying.

I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds.

I made a decision a long time ago that if I want creativity in my life—and I do—then I will have to make space for fear, too.

No necesitas el permiso de nadie para llevar una vida creativa.

Hvad enten du mener, at du er genial, eller du tror, du er håbløs, så skab det, du har brug for at skabe, og send det ud i verden.

It also never occurred to me to go ask an authority figure for permission to become a writer. I'd never seen anybody in my family ask anyone for permission to do anything. They just made stuff. So that's what I decided to do: I decided to just go make stuff.

It doesn't discourage me in the least, in other words, to know that my life's work is arguably useless. All it does is make me want to play.

when courage dies, creativity dies with it.