Quotes About Inspiration

all to no end save beauty the eternal –

he sees squirming roots trampled under the foliage of his mind by the holiday crowds as by the feet of the straining minister. From his eyes sparrows start and sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned under the falls) . Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out your kind.

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similies and pretty thoughts and images. I have experienced that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious recording of the day's experiences freshly and with the appearance of reality – This sort of thing is seriously to the development of any ability in a man, it fastens him down, makes him a – It destroys, makes nature an accessory to the particular theory he is following, it blinds him to his world, –

Poets are damned, but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

But though I have felt free only in the presence of works of the imagination, knowing the quickening of the sense which came of it, and though this experience has held me firm at such times, yet being of a slow but accurate understanding, I have not always been able to complete the intellectual steps which would make me firm in the position. So most of my life has been lived in hell -- a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear

One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo

That this blind and aging man forged ahead with such gusto is a remarkable lesson, a tale for the ages. Euler's courage, determination, and utter unwillingness to be beaten serves, in the truest sense of the word, as an inspiration for mathematician and non-mathematician alike. The long history of mathematics provides no finer example of the triumph of the human spirit.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

the genius of Churchill was his union of affinities of the heart and of the mind, the total fusion of animal and spiritual energy"—but

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

Read, read, read.

If a story is in you, it has got to come out.

Poate c? au avut dreptate când au pus dragostea în c?rÈ›i, se prea poate ca ea s? nu poat? exista în alt? parte.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.