Quotes About Inspiration

You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . ." How does it go?

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match,

After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man's long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché.

We all hitched our wagons to the highest stars we could find.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've had a product first. It's immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.

In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

What i want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses...but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will be seem mystical to the practical-minded- bu then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.

We can't tell who first had an idea; we can only tell who first had it influentially, who formulated it in a striking way and left it in some form, poem or equation or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition. The radical ideas that have been changing our attitudes toward our habitat have been around forever.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

It is the celestial ennui of apartmentsThat sends us back to the first idea.

Money is a kind of poetry.

The poet is priest of the invisible.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

Just as my fingers on these keysMake music, so the self-same soundsOn my spirit make a music, too.

His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

The imagination is man's power over nature.