Quotes About Inspiration

Barbie is my role modle. She might not do anything, but she looks good doing it.

The intimate yet tense interrelationship among these three forces -- humans, earth, and fire -- makes my soul tremble. I don't believe creative impulse can exist without the trembling of the soul.

The mission of the Holy Ghost is to partake of the things of the Father and the Son and teach them unto those who have received the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands. He guides the true disciples in all truth, shows them things to come, reveals the past and makes known the hidden treasures of the kingdom of God.

The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them.

There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

If any man loves the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.

My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.

Art is one of the few places where talent and madness can actually go to squirrel away inside each other.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

It was a time in my life when many things bored me deeply and I hungered for beauty and those realms of pure elation granted to those who had the imagination to know what to look for and how to find it.

That's what a good book does-it puts readers on their knees. It makes you want to believe in a world you just read about-the one that will make you feel different about the world you thought you lived in, the world that will never be the same.