Quotes About Inspiration

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can't draw any better than a five-year-old.

The term 'role model' is so odious, but the truth is it's a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

It's a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do something. 20

she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you.

Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

but to create a real feeling—made

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I

A superstar takes everybody everywhere. "What

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...

Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: I don't understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people.

certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.

The clarity disturbed me. "She

I do think art can and often does offer models of behavior, or at least suggests possibilities of behavior, but I dislike the aspirational tone of 'role model.' Roth's gift with Portnoy was large precisely because it had no aspirational element and no precise directions. Like any good gift, the less strings we find attached to it the better. The offer was not: You, too, can be like Portnoy. The offer was: Portnoy exists! Be as you please.