Quotes About Inspiration

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

Man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something

Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.' Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. 'And this salt-spoon,' he said, with childlike enjoyment, 'can be the body.

Most people don't associate anythin'--their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise and goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

Yesterday she looked like a Renaissance portrait stepped out of its frame. I put it down first of all to the effect of gold lamé, but on consideration, I think it was probably due to "lerve.

Did you want to be a missionary in your youth? I did. I think most kids do some time or another, which is odd, seein´ how unsatisfactory most of us turn out.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words? So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night

That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …

The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;

She had written what she felt herself called upon to write; and, though she was beginning to feel that she might perhaps do this thing better, she had no doubt that the thing itself was the right thing for her. It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.

I'm sorry,' said Wimsey. 'It fascinates me. I think the most joyous thing in life is to loaf round and watch another bloke doing a job of work.

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them." ? Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.

Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

The cure to boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I hate writing, but I love having written.

I hate writing, I love having written

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.

Saturday Night was chaotic by design. From Lorne on down, the tenets of the show's production philosophy were that inspiration, accident, and passion were of greater value than discipline, habit, and control.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.