Quotes About Inspiration

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.

Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

I write when I am inspired and I make sure I am inspired every day.

He…who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

It's a comfortable thing, music is.

You will tell me that you have just learned love; I will tell you that you have just learned hope.

La sabiduría suprema es tener sueños lo bastante grandes para no perderlos de vista mientras se persiguen

Don't be a writer; be writing.

Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them.

To my Western eyes, they were paragons of graceful competence and imagined wholeness. Sina's

Brian remained enchanted by the music of words - what he once called 'the incredible foot-stomping joy of a well tuned phrase.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie.

Yes, did you hear what that woman said? . . . I think it's the artist is the only person who is really given the capability of being happy, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. Don't you think so? Don't you think so? . . .

The sky was a deep gray-blue, banded with the colors of rust seen under water.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.