Quotes About Inspiration

The Past Our cradle, not our prison there is danger as well as appeal in its glamor. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repitition.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.

Design is not for philosophy it's for life.

In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

How well I would write if I were not here!

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can't make anything.

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

Tu casa, al ser el lugar donde lees, puede decirnos cuál es el lugar que los libros tienen en tu vida, si son una defensa que tú interpones para mantener alejado al mundo de fuera, un sueño en el que te hundes como en una droga, o bien si son puentes que lanzas hacia el exterior, hacia el mundo que te interesa tanto que quieres multiplicar y dilatar sus dimensiones a través de los libros.

The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.

La fantasia è un posto dove ci piove dentro.

Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!

All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.

The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.