Quotes About Inspiration

Petersburg did not grow up like other towns. Neither commerce nor geopolitics can account for its development. Rather it was built as a work of art.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

You killed more people than anybody in history. Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.

Isolation is the optimum environment for creativity.

Thank God for you, Ender. Thank God.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don't want to go through what you've been through to get there.

I saw, I wrote, and the world changed a little.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

Perhaps every writer who thoroughly creates a fictional world will inevitably create a mirror of his own time and yet also create a world that no one else but him has ever visited...

Achilles acted as if he had already won, and because the other kids followed him, he had.

He thought of half a dozen ideas before he went to sleep. Ender would be pleased-every one of them was stupid.

It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a storyteller stops wanting to try.

So that's it? asked the expendable. Final decision, said Ram. And it's the right one. Why do you think so? Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options. A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions. Shut up, said Ram.

For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.

it made him want to sing hymns he'd never even heard before

You underestimate yourself.

If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous.

There's greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit.

The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

Writers create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

there's no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment.

my courage is nothing but borrowed courage." "Not borrowed," said Mother. "Stored up. In us. Like a bank. We've seen your courage and we saved some for you when you temporarily ran out and needed some of it back." "Cash flow problem, that's all it was," said Father.

Isolation is—the optimum environment for creativity. It

Stories are invented as you go along...