Quotes About Inspiration

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist.

You're a writer. Make it up.

Writing is no answer but when you feel deeply there is little else to do.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid the state of being alone.

Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.

We have knowledge. We have to do something." His first punched the hair. "Who is with me!" Noone of the moved so much as a muscle.

The secret of good cooking is, first, having a love of it… If you're convinced that cooking is drudgery, you're never going to be good at it, and you might as well warm up something frozen.

In a way song writing can almost be detrimental, because suddenly you find an outlet that is a kind of cheating. You don't need to have direct communication. You can say, 'I can't describe it to you, but I will record it and send it to you.'

Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.

The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.

The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills and as immortal.

I can but repeat that art is not a branch of pedagogy!

Yes, I repeat, there is always something to be done with words, and here are thirty-two authentic words from the Master Philologist himself, not to speak of three commas and a full-stop. Oh, I shall certainly go far with this.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

He who enters a university walks on hallowed ground.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.

In 1948, at age seventy-six, Orville Wright died after two heart attacks.

Any music comes from the inner mind and soul, reaching out to the unknown.