Quotes About Inspiration

I'm a great believer in providing children with experiences that are not for them but can be overheard.

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.

Hay personas tiernas y sentimentales, sobre todo entre los más jóvenes, que se quedan con una muy mala impresión cuando les digo que yo escribo para ganar dinero. Les gusta tanto la idea del artista muriéndose de hambre en una buharda, que la pobreza se les antoja la situación indispensable para producir arte. Pero la preocupación [...] no es un buen estado de ánimo para escribir.

her, so Ama was free to imagine. One day she took some flat bread sweetened with honey and walked the three-hour journey along the trail to Cho-Lung-Se, where there was a monastery. By wheedling and patience, and by bribing the porter with some of the honey bread, she managed to gain an audience with the great healer Pagdzin

Tell them stories

Lyra marvelled at the effect hope could have.

Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it. Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, has been the same since.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

The life he described sounded like paradise to me; that he could think to do nothing better with his time than turn sentences around seemed to me a blessing bestowed not only upon him but upon world literature.

The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is.

The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel—on the body of every Jewish child!—not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.

Makarska and Madamaska.

For I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoff's spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love.

Victor Frankl? Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning?

It is true that doing original math is 'lonely.' But it is also true that professional mathematicians compose a community.

The world would be a sadder place without stories.

It will not go out,' said Keeva, putting her hand on Ustarte's shoulder. 'He is a hero. My uncle told me that heroes have special souls that are blessed by the Source. He was a wise man, my uncle.

Most men just react to circumstances, but thinkers create the circumstances. If

You understand? If the past must haunt you, then use it wisely. You cannot alter the past, but you can use it to alter the future. The terror you saw has strengthened you, Connavar. It has given you purpose. Bless the dead for that. And move on.

This is the real magic of fantasy fiction: it can feed souls and change lives.