Quotes About Inspiration

The harder it has been for a son of earth to win freedom, The more mightily does he stir his fellow man.

Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Carry the fire.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

When you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. [Interview, The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 20, 2009]

My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.

Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. [ Interview with Oprah Winfrey , June 5, 2007]

Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.

Teaching writing is a hustle.

Writing is very subconscious and the last thing I want to do is think about it.

If he is not the word of God God never spoke

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

He said if he is not the word of God God never spoke (4)

You have to carry the fire.

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

The founders of quantum mechanics—Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg—had nothing to guide them but an intuition about how the world should be.