Quotes About Inspiration

Sometimes, all it takes is one gesture, one word, to change the course of someone's life. Even if you know it won't last forever.

Vincent had ten major ideas every week: three brilliant, five good, and two ridiculous.

Dad used to say a story was worth writing if it made a difference to even one person. in Paper Daughter

Off to the left, a 2nd gray brown smudge rose to bifurcate the cerulean of the late afternoon sky.

Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm.

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone's stood on it. I don't think so. It would take more than a man's foot to steal the moon.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.

I wrote my way out.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.