Quotes About Inspiration

But I remember a scene where someone sneaks out into the woods to meet someone. ... And that's where it came from. Everything else is there to turn it from an image into a story. ... That image was strong enough for me to never give up on it, no matter what my editors and agents thought.

Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture.

I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

Then Nature shaped a poet's heart -- a lyre From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows Drew trembling music, wakening sweet desire.

As the blind Milton's memory of light The deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone, Wrought joys for them surpassing all things known In our restricted sphere of sound and sight-- So while the glaring streets of brick and stone Vex with heat, noise, and dust from morn till night, I will give rein to Fancy, taking flight From dismal now and here, and dwell alone, With new-enfranchised senses.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

Lo--a black line of birds in wavering thread Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

Design has killed architecture. Design is what they teach in the schools.

the schist pyramids can leave us contrite. Greatness is in the intention; and not in dimensions.

Faire une architecture c'est faire une créature. Etre rempli se remplir s'être rempli éclater exulter froid de glace au sein des complexités devenir un jeune chien content. Devenir l'ordre. ...

mimarl???n, kendilerini bütünüyle ve ateÅŸli bir biçimde ona adayanlara bir tür mutluluk getireceÄŸini, düÅŸüncenin doÄŸum sanc?lar?ndan ve ???lt?l? dünyaya geliÅŸinden doÄŸan o kendinden geçmeye benzer duyguyu yaÅŸataca??n? sezemediler. BuluÅŸun, yarat?c?l???n gücüdür bu ve insana içindeki en saf ÅŸeyleri verme olana??n? saÄŸlar.

Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

Dreams take short cuts.

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.