Quotes About Inspiration

As was Max's method of demo making, all the hooks in the song were worked up to their finished state, but most of the verses were unfinished, often mere vowel sounds. There was no bridge yet, because, as Lunt puts it, "Max would say, 'If you don't like the song by then, fuck you'—in his polite Swedish way, of course.

True innovation does not happen when we control creativity," Shai wrote in 2005, "but when we challenge, create shared vision, and passionately pursue excellence."3

You shine...such a light on me.

Because...because how can I expect the world to be a better place if I ain't gonna try real hard to make it better?

Look around you, Jayavar, she continued. See how the temple inspires? How the dreams of its makers can still be felt on this day? You must inspire our people just as our temples do, by convincing them that they're part of something far more beautiful and glorious than themselves. That's what Khmers have always believed and what we must continue to believe.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished you are always surprised. - John Steinbeck from the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.

I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.

The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience.

I eat stories like grapes.

What some people find in religion a writer may find in his craft...a kind of breaking through to glory.

No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.

Henri the painter was not French and his name was not Henri. Also he was not really a painter. Henri has so steeped himself in stories of the Left Bank in Paris that he lived there although he had never been there.

With knowledge there is no hope,... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.

The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine.