Quotes About Inspiration

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must remember that

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don't be shown up by a baboon

Don't give up. I don't think any other advice works. Writing is one of those things where you just have to do it. There will be far more people to discourage you than to encourage you. The time never comes to you, the inspiration doesn't come to you. You just sit down and do it." – James Lee Burke

If you're still stuck, re-watch Misery and imagine that your number one fan insists that you finish by the end of the month.

Give yourself permission to be bad. Write first, polish later.

Dwight Swain, the great writing teacher, once said that the secret of excitement is to go deeper into your characters. Create more backstory, more secrets, more complexity, and you'll get excited again.

Structure is translation software for your imagination.

at least ten writing sessions.

Don't you love that? One of the greatest scientific innovations of all time just came to Townes as he was sitting on a bench in a park. And then he starts "scratching" it out on paper.

Good writers are good readers.

what led Twain to this conclusion: a conviction that great fiction, including his own, was necessarily autobiographical.

For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life–rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined–was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.

Don't sleep through your dreams.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

There's one good kind of writer -- a dead one.

Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write.

I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing." —

When one is highly alert to language, then nearly everything begs to be a poem.

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.