Quotes About Inspiration

I think we conjure up and invent people, and then whoever happens to be there is the recipient of our imagination. A good deal of the attraction between people, I think, is based on the fact that one is able to absorb the creation

Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

Anything." I loved the way she said that. Granny's "Christian women" came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Look around you. Apartheid is being dismantled and Nelson Mandela walks the streets of South Africa. Until a few years ago, I could not imagine that happening. Russia is a new place, so is China. The communist bogeyman I was threatened with throughout my childhood is gone. The world is no less dangerous, and people are still dying for their origins, beliefs, color, and sexuality, but I find myself full of startled awe and hope. The rigid world into which I was born has been shaken profoundly.

Asking "what if" and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one person's perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.

He finished his drink. 'I don't like mornings either,' he said. "That's why I'm a writer.

Why are you here?" Silence. Then the boy said slowly, "Because I admire you.

He lived in her, his disciple. For her to think, now, as he would have done. And to act always thereafter.

Men throughout Scotland and over the narrow seas who lived different lives because they had known him. To carry his bright legacy into the future, he did not require to have children. No one, once they had met him, could remain the same.

I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.

I am the product of many whose lives have touched mine, from the famous, distinguished, and powerful to the little known and the poor.

I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power—the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.