Quotes About Inspiration

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word precursor is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. -- Essay: Kafka and his Precursors

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

La literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it.

It is a fact, indeed, that most of the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates, the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates

Pensar, analizar, inventar no son actos anómalos, son la normal respiración de la inteligencia. Glorificar el ocasional cumplimiento de esa función, atesorar antiguos y ajenos pensamientos, recordar con incrédulo estupor lo que el doctor universalis pensó, es confesar nuestra languidez o nuestra barbarie. Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será.

Art is fire plus algebra.

La imaginación está hecha de convenciones de la memoria. Si yo no tuviera memoria no podría imaginar.

That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.

In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.

The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors.

El arte sucede cada vez que leemos un poema.

The fact is that every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Mi empresa no es difícil, esencialmente. Me bastaría ser inmortal para llevarla a cabo. Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote

I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in Olalla when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Cuando, en Ginebra o Zurich, la fortuna Quiso que yo también fuera poeta, Me impuse, como todos, la secreta Obligación de definir la luna. Pensaba que el poeta es aquel hombre Que, como el rojo Adán del paraíso, Impone a cada cosa su preciso Y no verdadero y no sabido nombre.