Quotes About Inspiration

There's only so long that you can stare at a wall before you feel like an idiot.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust

I don't believe in fairy tales, but I believe in you

Let all the dreamers wake the nation.

I feel the universe is telling me something. And it doesn't even matter if it's true or not. What matters is that I feel it, and believe it. The enormity rises within me. The universe nods along to the songs.

This is what love does. It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot.

There is nothing so heartening as a chance.

This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible.

I'm not talking what you preach-- there is no practicing here. I am talking living what you preach. And to do that, you gotta preach what you live. I know what I'm here for And I know what the Lord is here for. The gospel. I will live and die by the Gospel.

Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eighths-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true. "Okay," you say. "Do you want to know how I met you?" I nod. "It was on the carousel. You were on the pink horse, I was on the yellow. You

But one night I was just so wired from being with Tris that I had to stay up until I turned the evening into a song.

He asked me if I wrote, and I told him the truth - that I was still observing, and hadn't yet found the words.

Instead of racing away from that terrible event," Alfred continued, "I think maybe it's time to start running toward something.

The Daily Bible by F. LaGard Smith, which presents the books of the Bible in their chronological—as opposed to canonical—order

David Foster Wallace: There's so much beauty and profundity in all kinds of shitty pop culture all around us.

but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it's a little fish—a fragment of an idea—that fish will draw in other fish, and they'll hook onto it. Then you're on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—or because of—his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn't so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don't think it was pain that made him so great—I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It's emotion and intellect going together. That's essential for the filmmaker.

Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it's still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that's one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments... In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song—Bobby Vinton's version of 'Blue Velvet.' The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.

Ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish, you catch the fish.

I went to a psychiatrist once. I was doing something that had become a pattern in my life, and I thought, Well, I should go talk to a psychiatrist. When I got into the room, l asked him, Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity? And he said, Well, David, I have to be honest: it could. And I shook his hand and left.