Quotes About Inspiration

I certainly admire people who do things.

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.

The moment a man begins to talk about technique that's proof that he is fresh out of ideas.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

From Raymond Chandler Speaking On his wife, after her death- For 30 years, 10 months and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at. That is all there is to say. She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.

Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." ? Raymond Chandler

Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.

When it's good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mishmash.

The only salvation for a writer is to write. If there is anything good in him, it will come out.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

Now go. An actor should know when to leave the stage, a poet when the lay is finished, and a bard when it is time to put aside the lute.

C'est en écrivant qu'on devient écriveron

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

Now who knows whether Socrates actually undertook what sounds like a pretty lame attempt at becoming a poet in the last month of his life? I'm the mother of a professional poet, and I know what goes into the making of such a creature. You might as well try to become a mathematician or a cosmologist in the last thirty days of your life.

That is Plato's great hope: that love of beauty can, when rightly cultivated and educated, battle immorality.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

Every morning I had to force myself to leave the apartment, so dark and protected, its walls lined with books. I stared longingly at the few English titles scattered among them. No, I'd tell myself sternly, you will not sit in an apartment in Rome reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Get out there and have some experiences for yourself, religious or otherwise. And I'd push myself out into the relentless noise and glare.

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. ("80 Books No Woman Should Read")

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.