Quotes About Inspiration

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

That's okay, I said. We're writers. We make things up.

There's nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn't in their books. It's better to read a good writer than meet one.

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

Nostalgia! Miss Frost cried. You´re nostalgic! She repeated. Just how old are you, William? She asked. Seventeen, I told her. Seventeen! Miss Frost cried, as if she'd been stabbed. Well, William Abbott, if you're nostalgic at seventeen, maybe you are going to be a writer!

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM, said Owen Meany. IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!

Behind every journey is a reason

the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid.

If you think you are capable of living without writing, do not write

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: as Garp put it, 'You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.' Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.

It was from just a few sentences that a writer learned anything from another writer.

She was a passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts of all; in contrast, she found writing to be a great waste of time—a childish self-indulgence, even messier than finger painting—but she admired reading, which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and inspiration. She must have thought it a pity that some poor fools had to waste their lives writing in order for us to have sufficient reading material. (page 236)

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

He was asleep—he was still dreaming—though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who's writing in his sleep.

If you're a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can't shut it off.

You know, it's not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.

According to my mother, I was a fiction writer before I'd written any ficton, by wich she meant not only that I invented things, or made things up, but that I prefered this kind of fantasising or pure imagining to what other people generally liked - she meant reality, of course.

And when you love a book, commit one glorious sentence of it—perhaps your favorite sentence—to memory. That way you won't forget the language of the story that moved you to tears.

Aber das ist es nun mal, was wir tun: wir träumen weiter gegen den Strom und unsere Träume entschlüpfen uns fast so lebendig, wie wir sie heraufbeschwören können.

When, if only for a moment, the novelist steps out of the creator's role, what roles are there for the novelist to step into? There are only creators of stories and characters in stories; there are no other roles. Ruth had never felt such anticipation before. She felt she had absolutely no will to take control of what happened next; in fact, she was exhilarated not to be in charge. She was happy not to be the novelist. She was not the writer of this story, yet the story thrilled her.

In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own.