Quotes About Inspiration

Each collection of poetry makes a force field of energy.

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple.

When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Starting a novel is like standing in a field and waiting for lightning to strike.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

What is technique but the absence of passion?

the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?

Running! If there is any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cannot think of what it might be.

Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.

But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

Anything that happens to me as a writer has been precipitated by an action of my own.

Of course, a literary work is a kind of nest: an elaborately and painstakingly woven nest of words incorporating chunks and fragments of the writer's life in an imagined structure, as a bird's nest incorporates all manner of items from the world outside our windows, ingeniously woven together in an original design.

the swans are beautiful like figures in a dream, that seem to represent something for which there are no adequate words.

Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.

And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.