Quotes About Inspiration

As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

If you don't believe in yourself, who will?' ~Maybeck

There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen.

I knew exactly what to do on Alien, it was funny.

And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.

Some Neanderthal had the magical idea of blowing through a reed ... to entertain the children one night in a cave somewhere. Then, in a blink of an eye ... civilization.

Thought gives rise to desire.

Riichiro Inagaki

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little.

It may just be an instant... a sudden flash of light! But it will burn so bright... so spectacular... and it will persevere so that it can shine for even one second longer! That is how we humans live!

J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher a clocher; des guirlandes de fenetre a fenetre; des chaines d'or d'etoile a etoile, et je danse.

Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.

Madame X set up a piano in the Alps.

How can you write if you can't cry?

When I grew up, people said, 'You'll never be the man your dad was.' And I said, 'Gee, I hope not.'

Just being happy helps other souls along Their burdens may be heavy and they not strong And your own sky will lighten, If other skies you brighten, by just being happy with a heart full of song.

Renee to show to the girls at the factory. When everything

I write for the girl I once was, who found paradise in the pages of a book and pure music in the characters' voices . . .

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.