Quotes About Inspiration

are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and

If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters." The

Reading had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape ... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately ... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

If there is a god [...] he's a poet. And a failed one at that.

there's still room for writing that holds out some hope for humanity.

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

My God, whispered Meina Gladstone, looking down at the body of Admiral Singh. I'm doing all this on the strength of a dream. Sometimes, said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, dreams are all that separates us from the machines.

habría dicho Quirón

I'm looking to make a miracle

And these years later, when I think of that essay, what I remember most is not the moment I saw my work in New Yorker font, not when I saw the illustration of my father, not the congratulatory phone calls and notes that followed, but that predawn morning in my bedroom, at my desk, the lights of cars below on Broadway, my computer screen glowing in the dark.

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

I have been writing all my life. Growing up, I wrote in soft-covered journals, in spiral-bound notebooks, in diaries with locks and keys. I wrote love letters and lies, stories and missives. When I wasn't writing, I was reading. And when I wasn't writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere-I was sure of it-and writing was what took me there.

There's a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you're a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don't wait for anybody to tell you it's okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That's your job.

Write the words The FIve Senses on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

If I'm not writing, my heart hardens, rather than lifts.

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it

You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

I was in the middle of my second novel and struggling. Instead of engagement, I felt a nagging worry. Had I lost my way? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn—but where? One afternoon, I met a friend of mine, a poet and novelist, for coffee. "I feel like I'm in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there's no land in sight," I told him. He took a sip of his drink and peered at me over his glasses. "Yeah," he said. "And you're building the boat.