Quotes About Inspiration

Writers help summon people to a vision of human betterment...They create an awareness not just to things as they are, but as they ought to be." ~ Norman Cousins

The only one," he murmured. His chin dipped a little bit. "You know that, Dru? You're the only person who's ever believed in me. You know what that'll do to a guy?" What?"I-" "It makes him want to live up to it.

Sometimes, as much as writing saves one's own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another's. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.

But when a girl's motivated, miracles are possible.

I am happy to see that more and more young people are once again taking up theatre.

If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable.

We'd had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds of thousands of words.

But I can't go out with a guy who's written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that's still inside me.

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time.

It's good to see art, to remember what a natural human impulse it has always been.

I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What's the point? You'll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable.

Three mornings later, after the dog walk but before my cereal and cup of tea, in the middle of my writing morning, in what I believe is the middle of a paragraph, I finish a sentence. I lift my pencil a few inches from the page and read it. It's the last sentence of the book. I can't think of another. That's it. I have my underpainting.

I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. 'Don't stop' I said. 'Your typing makes my brain work better.

Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, 'Your typing makes my brain work batter,' I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work.

I try to write something new. It's bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn't feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her.

Victor asks us to find the moments of heat in the writing we have done, has us circle and isolate those words, and with them we write a poem. We read them out loud. There's one about an ashtray, a sequined dress, flour on a kitchen floor. Victor says something about each one. The feeling in the room is beautiful, wide open.

For so long I'd felt that what I'd been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating

I love these geese. They make my chest feel tight and full and help me believe that things will be alright again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I'm giving it credit for. (5)

talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.

I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say.