Quotes About Inspiration

True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I've begged them to leave.

Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar.

Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they're poets, right, like that's all it takes—being in love.

For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing--if these guys don't know the secret to living, I don't know who does. (The Grieving Owl, page 157)

February 16, 1988 Reasons to live: 1. Christmas 2. The family beach trip 3. Writing a published book 4. Seeing my name in a magazine 5. Watching C. grow bald 6. Ronnie Ruedrich 7. Seeing Amy on TV 8. Other people's books 9. Outliving my enemies 10. Being interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air

It really is torture to sit around the house and write all day. I'm thinking it might motivate me to finish the book faster, the thought that after it's finished I can return to housecleaning. The

Boston's That is good is Berlin's Das ist gut. It's an excellent way to start and leaves the listener thinking, 'Hey, Ich kann do dis.' :D

The Artist's impressions of a walk in the woods. The Artist's view on viewing. The Artist on Art. How do you get your ideas for stories, Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes—

In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.

For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it - isn't that what we've all been waiting for?

The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.

the music piped through the speakers was Christian—the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome.

Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan.

Something in the early summer of 2019 had us all thinking about enormous gaping assholes.

That's the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.

Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.' (John Cage)

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.

UNDER CONSTRAINTS, CREATIVITY THRIVES

Paper is brain interface. Paul Saffo

Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the thing one cannot live with or without.

Though I am not rich, I am not absolutely poor. . . . I am working now less for myself than for those around me. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, MAY 6, 1868