Quotes About Inspiration

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may. - from My Olivetti Speaks

The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is that all about? What is it for?

If my heart were a compass, you'd be North.

it was Harriet Stowe's practice to rise at 4:30 each morning to see the coming of the dawn, hear the singing of the birds, and to enjoy the over-shadowing presence of her God.

But we do go forward. Inspired, once again, by military service and a war against a racist enemy—this time Nazi Germany—Black Americans press their calls for equality. The Supreme Court invalidates government racial segregation, in public schools and elsewhere.

If you dream, think of me.

You can't simply highlight an inspiring paragraph in a book and walk away changed.

Source 1. Personal Motivation

As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape—with any degree of success—is the person in the mirror. There

The next two sources of influence that routinely act on you are equally easy to spot. The people who surround you both motivate and enable your habits.

We are attracted to another person at a soul level not because that person is our unique complement, but because by being with that individual we are somehow provided with an impetus to become whole ourselves.

To naked eye, dear sir, you're whole, but to Elohim's eyes, you're cause to shiver! Have you not yet gleaned your unnatural role? You're not the archer, sir...you're just his quiver!

Don't bitch or punish the world: just create. Create something nobody's ever seen before and there is a good chance the world will notice you. Attacking teen girls on the internet is the saddest form of masturbation that exists and requires no discernible skill or talent. Because if you're not being useful in this world, you're being useless. Don't be useless: go make stuff that makes people happy.

lifes too $hort kids; do the shit that makes you happy!

Most people hate their jobs, true, but my old man despised his in an Ahab-and-Moby (or Eminem-and-Moby) kinda way. He never said, "Go into the entertainment biz, son"—he was just a living example of why it was worth taking a shot going after the stuff of dreams rather than simply getting a job. I saw how much my dad hated working and realized he was right: Working blows. If you hate what you do, it'll always be work.

Make a thing where there was none, kids. It's crazy what it can lead to.

It didn't matter, though, how weakly sentimental the catalyst had been, only that he'd been receptive to it.

From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it's hard to summon it when you really need it.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism