Quotes About Inspiration

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you've done, not because the research you've done.

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. ( James Meek in interview with TMO )

We have a light upon our house, and it gives hope to all who sail upon the stormy seas. Do ya know what it means to have a light burning atop your home? It is safety, a place of refuge, seen by all that as a signal that ye stand for something greater than this world, greater than us all.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

A faith like Lincoln's would transform the world!

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

Our first response to hearing a story is the desire to tell it ourselves-the greater the story the greater the desire. We will go to considerable time and inconvenience to arrange a situation for its retelling. It is as though the story is itself seeking the occasion for its recurrence, making use of us as its agents. We do not go out searching for stories for ourselves; it is rather the stories that have found us for themselves.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist. Therefore

Ms. Gleason kept us hopping on Tuesday. No, she didn't give us pogo sticks. But I learned so much that my head grew two hat sizes.

But all I had to show for the week was a blank sheet of paper. Maybe I could tell Ms. Gleason I had come up with a new kind of poem--the invisible kind.

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

The primary purpose of education is not to teach you to earn your bread, but to make every mouthful sweeter.

No member of the human race stepping out onto another heavenly body could possibly have represented the best of humanity more than Neil Armstrong did.

Youth is the time for dreams, boy...The trick is, when you get older, not to forget them. —Captain John Winters

He climbed through the vast stillness, alone...and yet somehow, he knew, no longer alone. For now his two fathers climbed with him.

Michelangelo once said that David already exists in the unpolished block of marble; the artist's job is to set him free by carving away everything that isn't David.

We can become inspired to shape a higher, more ideal future, and when we do, miracles happen.

The human perception of this energy first begins with a heightened sensitivity to beauty.

Inspiration is what keeps us well.