Quotes About Inspiration

One God, One Aim, One Destiny. (Motto of the UNIA)

Africa has produced countless numbers of men and women, in war and in peace, whose lustre and bravery outshine that of any other people. Then why not see good and perfection in ourselves?

God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.

If I die in Atlanta my work shall then only begin, but I shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa's glory.

From humble bandannas do mighty albums grow...

Service is selflessness--the opposite of the lifestyle that we see so much of in America today. The things that entertain us don't often lift us up, or show us as the people we can rise up to become. The people who appear in this book--and others who did things I can't talk about--are my role models. They quietly live out the idea expressed in the Bible (John 15:13): "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

it's little things like that, the words of a song, which can give you the strength to go on.

You don't get people to follow you by demanding it with your words. You do it by commanding it with your example.

His favorite book was Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire,

And difference, as he learned that day, inspired a particular kind of savagery.

They were innocent people. They could just do things you couldn't imagine. I can see code, do you get it? Algorithms that confound straights are just patterns to me. They come in my dreams. I dream the most beautiful programs never written.

I love telling stories for a living. The process of writing has its frustrations, but also its joys (there's no high like typing "The End.") The research is incredible. I love meeting other authors. I love working on something that's purely mine. But the best part is the idea that I kept somebody up past their bedtime, or made them miss their train stop. As a lifelong addict of story, it makes me happy to think that my work might hit other people the way books hit me.

something else

Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

Hard work IS its own reward. Integrity IS priceless. Art DOES feed the soul.

Whatever goes down, whatever turns up—make food and music and dance and story out of it.

Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference.

Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.

So we spent our undergraduate years awash in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and Middle English, living with Beowulf and Sir Gawain, ... and we were required to pay hardly any attention to the 19th-century novel, and not much to the 18th. As for the 20th century, it might have never arrived. As a friend of mine said, 'They taught us to believe in dragons.

What you are saying and the way you are saying it are very closely linked. I discovered that I always had to let the book I was writing find its own style. Only in that way can you be sure that you are doing the right thing by your subject matter. It's a strange feeling -- as if the book has a life of its own.

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

When we read a book, though, we call it ours, don't we, and I have always said that's because readers make a book their own through reading it. They do half the work, with their own imaginations, fleshing things out, painting each character and place and event in more detail than we have actually set out on paper, and we writers merely set the readers on their way.

Genius is fostered by energy.