Quotes About Inspiration

Thinking this he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time.

cuando se crea algo, adquiere vida propia y deja de pertenecer al creador que la ha moldeado y dirigido según sus deseos.

Science fiction acts best as a guide to help people cope with the present. It should sharpen our concern and ability to handle current problems. It shouldn't just be an escape.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace…salt for the spirit.

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

The mind has plenty of ways of preventing you from writing, and paralysing self-consciousness is a good one. The only thing to do is ignore it, and remember what Vincent van Gogh said in one of his letters about the painter's fear of the blank canvas - the canvas, he said, is far more afraid of the painter.

We need to imagine as well as measure.

I'm working on another Lyra book right now – it's called The Book of Dust. "It's going very well and it will be finished when I write the words 'The End'.

The question authors get asked more than any other is Where do you get your ideas from? And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading.

Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark.

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it's an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you." An interview with Philip Pullman.

But if we get education right... it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time … - Isis lecture, 2003

One strange thing about stories is that you sometimes know how long they're going to be, even before you've begun thinking about them.

I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that - not I am a writer, but rather I write stories. If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

And was it true before Pythagoras realized it?" Malcolm thought. "Yes," he said. "It must have been." "So he didn't invent it. He discovered it." "Yes." "Good. Now let's take one of the alethiometer symbols.

Tell them stories. That's what we didn't know. All this time, and we never knew! But they need the truth. That's what nourishes them. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, everything. Just tell them stories.