Quotes About Inspiration

Ó, édes serdülÅ'kor – amikor a "tehetségeseket" hivatalosan is elkülönítik a hordától, hogy ily módon a néhány kiválasztott lélek gyenge vállaira helyezzék az egész társadalom kreativitással kapcsolatos ábrándjainak terhét, miközben mindenki mást egy sokkal hétköznapibb, inspirációmentes létezésre kárhoztatnak.

since when did creativity become a suffering contest?

I work steadily, and I always thank the process.

your fear will always show up—especially when you're trying to be inventive or innovative. Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.

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

By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration.

Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, "No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of the forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly . . . it begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

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. We make things because we like making things. We pursue the interesting and the novel because we like the interesting and the novel.

If what I've written here ends up helping you, that's great, and I will be glad. That would be a wonderful side effect. But at the end of the day, I do what I do because I like doing it.

But to suggest that nobody ever made valuable art unless they were in active emotional distress is not only untrue, it's also kind of sick.

I've never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative.

The fun part (the part where it doesn't feel like work at all) is when you're actually creating something wonderful, and everything's going great, and everyone loves it, and you're flying high. But such instants are rare.

And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

You can certainly live without the debt, because debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.

None of it was ever easy, but that wasn't the point. I had never asked writing to be easy; I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me.

Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana . . .

We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.

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

You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.

From the center of my life, there came a great fountain…

There is something magnificent about encouraging someone to step forward into his own self-respect at last—especially when it comes to creating something brave and new.

strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that's what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one. The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

Is it sometimes a difficult path? Sure. Does it make for an interesting life? The most. Will the inevitable difficulties and obstacles associated with creativity make you suffer? That part—cross my heart—is entirely up to you.