Quotes About Inspiration

I never think at all when I write nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.

Just as it was necessary to reinflate my lungs to overcome pneumonia, I needed the breath of God to help me overcome the depression of my spirit. I

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

Il talento non esiste, capitano. Esistono soltanto l'ispirazione e l'ambizione.

I don't even know what sound is, much less what it's for. It isn't to make money that's for sure. I've never made any.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

looks out at a wave breaking like a white pencil being drawn across a blue piece of paper.

There is no water to put out the fire. Mi canto la esperanza. —Carlos Santana "Maria Maria

The guys of Savino's generation liked what they saw in the movies and wanted to be that. So Lou ain't trying to be Lefty Ruggiero, he's trying to be Al Pacino being Lefty Ruggiero. He ain't trying to be Tommy DeSimone, he's going for Joe Pesci being Tommy DeSimone, not being Jake Amari but James Gandolfini.

That makes the air very sweet, just being able to smell it and know you're going to keep smelling it. You're already ahead on your day.

My mom, she's from Ireland, coached tennis in Nigeria when she was a missionary and turned me on to it when I was young.

There are enough critical voices in this world; you don't have to be one of them.

Let him hurl these pieces of toast like new and radical ideas that must be cast into the world. Pieces of toast like angry children who will hit us and upset us and change our ways of thinking and feeling.

Like a lot of painters in this century, you seem to enjoy lifting things out of the world, in this case words or phrases, and then... And then, sung to and Simonized, theyre thrown into the mesh.

I enjoy doing layoutproblems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.

We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.