Quotes About Inspiration

Don't cry for me, just love yourself more today than you did yesterday. It's true when they say tomorrow isn't promised and live everyday like it's your last.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight.

Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

Writing is freedom.

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.

common words of spark and heart.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

Once you start a file, Delphine, it's just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn't have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It's all been waiting just for you.

What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Writing is an organized way of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write them.

It is just so interesting, he says at last. The colors and all. The colors and all.

What can you think about in the face of this kind of beauty? I get scared, I know that.

dreams (the waste material of premonitions).

If you can see yourself as an artist, and you can see that your life is your own creation, then why not create the most beautiful story for yourself?

PRELUDE TO A NEW DREAM

As my friend and coach, Nelson Searcy, says, "Hope is not a church strategy.

I'm a song writer, professional dreamer...

A positive emotional state is ideal for creative thought, but it is not very well suited for getting things done.