Quotes About Inspiration

Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.

I come from a whole goddam family of inventors, said Will. We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries.

Without travel, writing dies.

My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know - he will know and through him we will know.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a 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. And

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

There's people that when they see Samuel Hamilton the first time might get the idea he's full of bull. He don't talk like other people. He's an Irishman. And he's all full of plans—a hundred plans a day. And he's all full of hope.

This must be a good book," he wrote in Working Days on June 10, 1938. "It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.

I want to take everything I've seen and thought and learned and reduce them and relate them and refine them until I have something of meaning, something of use. And I can't seem to do it.

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff.

He raised his face into the sky and his soul arose out of him into the sun's afterglow.

Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.

Boileau said that Kings, Gods, and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor. . . . And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now." —Steinbeck in a 1939 radio interview

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.

Lee watched him for a while before he went back to his kitchen. He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

Jim said, "It's something that grows out of a fight like this. Suddenly you feel the great forces at work that create little troubles like this strike of ours. And the sight of those forces does something to you, picks you up and makes you act. I guess that's where authority comes from.

Il vino aggiunge maiuscole e asterischi a un buon racconto... a una storia vera.

He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming—and, properly applied, that is all advertising is.

In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnett: I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process. Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. p xxxviii

Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

I also wonder what would have happened if Steinbeck had forsaken Le Morte d'Arthur and invented a world of his own. Free to follow his own course, he might have crafted a major work of fantasy. It's not as unlikely as it may seem. His first novel, Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History, was one of high adventure, with more fiction than history.

his writings derive from a basically romantic temperament)

Pacific Grove benefits by one of those happy accidents of nature that gladden the heart, excite the imagination, and instruct the young.