Quotes About Inspiration

Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn't stop with rote engineering information.

There is mountain air in this room. It's cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in - brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. "Art" when it is opposed to "Science" is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.

Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.

We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.

I wake up wondering if I know we're near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. Art when it is opposed to Science is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.

but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination—"unstuckness," in other words—are completely outside its domain.   We

The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even that idea this afternoon about caring and technology—they are not my own. I haven't really had a new idea in years.

Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.

I dont believe in the Devil, but if I did I should think of him as the trainer who drives Heaven to break its own records.

What's the bee in your bonnet? Seems to be some kind of idealism.

They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upwards and outwards.

Es war ihm beim Zustandekommen dieser unerwarteten Lösung einre jener außer der Regel liegenden Gedanken zu Hilfe gekommen, von denen man nicht sowohl sagen könnte, dass sie erst dann entstehen, wenn man sie nicht mehr erwartet, als vielmehr, dass ihr überraschendes Aufleuchten an das der Geliebten erinnert, die längst schon zwischen den anderen Freundinnen da war, ehe der bestürzte Freier zu verstehen aufhört, dass er ihr andere hat gleichstellen können.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't.

If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.

I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

You don't write poems sitting at a typewriter; you write them swimming or climbing a mountain or walking.

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.

And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It's

For the next 16 hours, fueled by coffee and amphetamines, I wrestled with John Lennon's scrawls and codes and symbols. As I transcribed his words, I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel Lennon's energy flowing through me.