Quotes About Inspiration

There is a genius in every man and woman, waiting to be brought forth.

You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Visualize your solutions. Picture an answer to the problem. Then make the picture real.

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

When a painting I'm working on becomes my singular focus—when I am "in the zone," as I've heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.

Prophet. Kahlil Gibran.

Don't write stories for teenagers or any other group," she advised. "Write them for yourself and let the audience that needs them find them.

If a book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, 'Wake up!

He sat on the rug and shouted correct answers to the contestants. His wild hair blocked off a corner of the screen. "You're pretty smart," I said during a commercial. "And you thought all I could do was hang wallpaper." He laughed. "You're just catching me during one of my fallow periods, that's all. One of my compost years. I'm expecting a creative leap pretty soon now.

That's often the case, of course—that creation and madness begin to dance with each other." "Like Van Gogh.

Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life

Your very flesh shall be a great poem...

A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.

I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell

Oh captain my captain

The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.

The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?