Quotes About Inspiration

I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life. I knew better than to ask this of my writing, because over the years, I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.

Work with all your heart, because - I promise 0 if you show up for your work day after day after day, you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.

People don't do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it.

There are songs, Waits says, that simply will not allow themselves to be born, and that will hold up the recording of an entire album.

He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs all the time, and when they were done with them, they would toss them out "like little origami things, or paper airplanes.

But through watching his children create so freely, Waits had an epiphany: It wasn't actually that big a deal. He told me, "I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people's minds." Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That's all it is. That realization, Waits said, seemed to open things up for him. Songwriting became less painful after that.

inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.

No, when I refer to "creative living," I am speaking more broadly. I'm talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear. One

And any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.

Intracranial jewelry-making! What a cool job! That's basically what we all do--all of us who spend our days making and doing interesting things for no particularly rational reason.

O trabalho quer ser feito, e quer ser feito através de você.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life. The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes.

But a lot of people don't know exactly what their passion is, or they may have multiple passions, or they may be going through a midlife change of passion—all of which can leave them feeling confused and blocked and insecure.

they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world.

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.

Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.

Whenever anybody tells me they want to write a book in order to help other people, I always think, Oh, please don't. Please don't try to help me.

There is something magnificent about encouraging someone to step forward into his own self-respect

I had only asked writing to be interesting. And it was always interesting to me. Even when I couldn't do it right, it was still interesting to me. It still interests me. Nothing has ever interested me more. That profound sense of interest kept me working

Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.

To have hummingbirds visit. Charlie set up a feeder outside her bedroom window. Never a poet like Dossy, Helen feels a new urge toward veerse. Flit and perch, hovercraft, I follow you.

In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.

Making a living is nothing, the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference - with words.