Quotes About Inspiration

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

the way wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of imagination

Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.

The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

often mild distraction that moves the imagination forward, not uninterrupted concentration.

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.

Revolutions are first of all ideas.

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.

my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast.

Rebecca Solnit

our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, "Fuck this shit," which carried the same general message, and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter.

This is the strange life of books that you enter alone 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 in which we meet.

The notes danced through the June air; Vivi could feel them dust her hair and shoulders. She could feel the notes enter her and settle deep into her bones.

Don't ever worry bout bein holy, babychild. Just keep your eyes wide open except when you sleep. Then let the Lord's mighty vision see you through the night.

the page swiftly. Sidda did not stop to correct herself, or to analyze why she was doing this. She simply glanced at the creekbank photo, sat at the cabin's table, and wrote from the heart. Oh, how Mama and the Ya-Yas laughed! I could hear them from the water where I played with

I couldn't wait until my own stroke was strong enough for me to follow in her wake.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

she repaid us by giving life the quality that but for her was only to be found in music

But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one's table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.

You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.--Quoted in Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Even when I write fiction, which I don't do too often, the fictional characters are familiar to me, like relatives I might have had in another life, and the setting is a place I know or have known. If I feel acquainted with the people and the landscape, I can enter this world and imagine what happens there and write it down. For me that world will always be some form of home.

It has taken me most of my writing life to understand that my "writing place" is here where I live, and that my "writing voice" is just my regular old voice, the one I use all the time. I am aware that the most important things in my life and my work are so close to me that I didn't even fully recognize them for a long time.

Another reason the "Are you still writing?" question is so hard to answer is that to ask me "Are you still writing?" is like asking "Are you still breathing?" Writing is the way I stay aware of being alive, the way I find out what I'm thinking, the way I understand the world.

I've always gone on the stage and told my stories. I am adventurer and a bard; I come home and I tell my story. Above all, I am a self-made man.