Quotes About Inspiration

If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.

Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliations, 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 fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

I...confirm the fact - with a certain bittersweet melancholy - that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

Entre las cosas hay una De la que no se arrepiente Nadie en la tierra. Esa cosa Es haber sido valiente. Siempre el coraje es mejor, La esperanza nunca es vana

De los diversos instrumentos inventados por el hombre, el más asombroso es el libro; todos los demás son extensiones de su cuerpo… Sólo el libro es una extensión de la imaginación y la memoria".

Yo he escrito también algunos cuentos en los cuales traté ambiciosa e inultimente de ser Kafka

El ejercicio de las letras es misterioso; lo que opinamos es efímero y opto por la tesis platónica de la Musa y no por la de Poe, que razonó, o fingió razonar, que la escritura de un poema es una operación de la inteligencia.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

Je n'écris pas pour une petite élite dont je n'ai cure, ni pour cette entité platonique adulée qu'on surnomme la Masse. Je ne crois pas à ces deux abstractions, chères au démagogue. J'écris pour moi, pour mes amis et pour adoucir le cours du temps.

In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.

Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Todo el mundo sabe dónde encontrar la poesía. Y, cuando aparece, uno siente el roce de la poesía, ese especial estremecimiento.

Tanr?sal bir çiçeÄŸin ya da düÅŸüncedeki bir çiçeÄŸin, geleceÄŸin çiçeÄŸi olmas?, güncel zamanda atomlar? henüz birleÅŸmemiÅŸ ve farkl? yerlerde bulunan çeliÅŸkili bir çiçek olmas? daha da inan?lmaz.

Poetry is given to the poet. I don't think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.

On lit ce qu'on aime, tandis qu'on écrit pas ce qu'on aimerait écrire, mais ce qu'on est capable d'écrire.

A classic book is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.

And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien--poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.

Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritman la vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.

If you ask me why I wrote "A thousand tambourines of crystal, wounded the light of daybreak –Mil panderos di cristal, herían la madruga," I will tell you that I saw them in the hands of trees and angels, but I cannot say more: I cannot explain their meaning. And that is how it should be. Through poetry a man more quickly reaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician silently turn away from.

Comprendí que el trabajo del poeta no estaba en la poesía; estaba en la invención de razones para que la poesía fuera admirable; naturalmente, ese ulterior trabajo modificaba la obra para él, pero no para otros.

Un gran libro como la Divina Comedia no es el aislado o azaroso capricho de un individuo; muchos hombres y muchas generaciones tendieron hacia él. Investigar sus precursores no es incurrir en una miserable tarea de carácter jurídico o policial; es indagar los movimientos, los tanteos, las aventuras, las vislumbres y las premoniciones del espíritu humano.