Quotes About Inspiration

We're often wrong at predicting who or what will transform us. Encountering certain people, books, music, places, or ideas Ã¢â'¬Â¦ at just the right time can immediately make our lives happier, richer, more beautiful, resonant, or meaningful. When it happens, we feel a kind of instant love for them, both deep and abiding. Now and then it can be something as trifling as a children's book, a returned telephone call, or a night at a seaside bar in Mykonos.

I know a lot of artists. The greatest loves of all their lives are their creations. Unfortunately most of us don't have that kind of talent, so we have to make do with falling in love with real people.

That's what writers do, Conroy, we wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them.

I live and breathe art",' said Phoebe. ' "What other people refer to as 'the real world' has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison".

If ever I'm disheartened by failures such as these, I simply reflect on my humble beginnings and marvel at the enormous distance I have travelled since then.

Conoce esa sensación? Seguro que sí: tropezarse con un artista cuyo trabajo te habla tan directamente que es como si los dos compartieran el mismo lenguaje cómplice, y eso a la vez te reafirmara en lo que siempre has pensado y te dijera algo completamente nuevo. (...) ¿No la ha sentido, entonces?

I admire your capacity for admiring.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

H]er mind was like a balloon with static cling, attracting random ideas as they floated by[.]

The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.

To dream of happiness, wake up, and walk on air Is to know the chance of happiness awake is there.

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

He'd inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who's uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they're used to in everyday life;

When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.

Sometimes, he [Congressmen John Lewis] said, you have to ask for something that you know you may not get. And still you have to ask for it. It's still worth fighting for and, even if you don't believe that you will see it in your lifetime, you have got to hold it up so that the generation that comes next will take it from your hands and, in their own time, see it as a goal worth fighting for again.

New York didn't set out to charm you. It was like God that way. You had to bring a lot of the enthusiasm yourself.

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or inspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind. And that's what you need, what you needed all along.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself.

Behold the onset of my flinty tone. Along with so much else, a soft-tissue sarcoma can apparently drain the exultation from one's prose.

The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television.

I'm forever writing around a void—I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is.

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.

Is he nuts? I think the expression used to be 'touched by God'. So that would be a yes.