Quotes About Inspiration

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

longer the pointed finger of condemnation, but the extended hand of hope; and an entire generation is recognizing this like never before, and reaching out for it.

All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves...full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers...

But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.

Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

Do what you love, and the money will follow.

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128

a circle of Göbekli T-stones, which looked very contemporary even though they were based on something over ten thousand years old.

Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting.

first bars of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony.

Al-Qahira, Ares, Auqakuh, Bahram. Harmakhis, Hrad, Huo Hsing, Kasei. Ma'adim, Maja, Mamers, Mangala. Mawrth, Nirgal, Shalbatanu, Simud and Tiu.

Art should be used to change things.

You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.

Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.

I can paint that fucking cave.

Power wasn't a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.

Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

When you had the world and your body as canvases, why deal in squares of wallpaper?

Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth. said Picasso