Quotes About Inspiration

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel. (- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.

The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy—the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

When I think of the good things still to be written I am glad, for there is no end to them, and I know I myself shall write some of them.

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Be great in act, as you have been in thought.

William Shakespeare

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

William Shakespeare

Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart, or in the head?

God shall be my hope, my stay, my guide and lantern to my feet.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot; Follow your spirit: and upon this charge, Cry — God for Harry! England and Saint George!

And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

My drops of tears I'll turn to sparks of fire.

William Shakespeare

I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name

I could be well moved, if I were as you; If I could pray to move, prayers would move me: But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament.