Quotes About Inspiration

Allusions to Golding's book can be found in movies (Hook with Robin Williams), television (a stand-up comedy bit in Seinfeld, "The Library," season 3, episode 5), the novels of Stephen King, and contemporary music. Three of the most powerful and relevant songs that reference the novel include U2's "Shadows and Tall Trees," Iron Maiden's "Lord of the Flies," and The Offspring's "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid.

Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

La vie imite l'art, l'art imite la vie; parfois je suis incapable de les distinguer.

I write out of revenge

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

I got vision; the rest of the world is wearing bifocals.

William Goldman

Jelenka Harvey Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 215 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003*

On one occasion Walter Brueggemann said, If you are a coward by nature, don't worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text, saying, 'I don't know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.' I like that image—the preacher hunkered down, taking cover behind the biblical text, speaking a word not of the preacher's devising.

All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it

The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.

In an article I once wrote on Picnic, I compared a play to a journey, in which every moment should be as interesting as the destination.

DOC    Yes, you want to study hard, Marie, learn to be a fine artist some day. Paint lots of beautiful pictures. I remember a picture my mother had over the mantelpiece at home, a picture of a cathedral in a sunset, one of those big cathedrals in Europe somewhere. Made you feel religious just to look at it.

His remarkable succession of inventions made him appear to possess almost magical powers, so that he was called "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The notion alternately amused and angered him. "Wizard?" he would say. "Pshaw. It's plain hard work that does it." Or, his much quoted statement: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Laziness, mental laziness in particular, tried his patience.

Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Act as if what you do makes a difference, it does.

You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.

We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable.

Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and opens a region though they fail to give a map.