Quotes About Inspiration

The most important imperative to be questioned is the one that tells you to go the the art supply store to be a painter.

How many times have you been out for a beer or dinner and people are coming up with business ideas? Everybody wants to think they've got that great business idea.

I heard my name associated with the Peter Pan syndrome more than once. But really, what's so wrong with Peter Pan? Peter Pan flies. He is a metaphor for dreams and faith.

The successful man doesn't use others, other people use the successful man, for above all the success is of service.

What really matters is not the pencil but the brain of the person holding it.

wait... promise me one more thing: if tomorrow you wake up feeling unoriginal or frail-hearted or faithless or tired of this world please pick up this book and start back at page one.

Don't go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.

As great poets do, he found a way to transmute the personal wound into something larger.

The life of the poem might be extended in ways you cannot know, and continue in a world so far from yours as to be nearly unimaginable. The circle that is the outer edge of your life extends, and goes on extending.

It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.

Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.

We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters. (...) low order primate elevated to high order ecclesiastical primate, elevated still further in these darkest last days to ultimate prime A grade superior being. For doing that, which my father did without thinking.

Copying lies at the heart of creativity.

the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy

Language, a great poem in and of itself, is all around us. We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure?

Writing is hard. It's tough to get up in the morning and look at the white snowfield of a trackless page. How to push forward? Use anger; use rage if you have to. Settle scores. And if you have no scores to settle, then create a few for yourself, not only for the purposes of public relations, but also for the purposes of inspiration. Hot-blooded, hot-tempered, always ready to take offense: the writer as duelist.

In spite of what many teachers of 'creative thinking' say, the best way to be creative is not to try to think without limits but to very carefully define what those limits should be.

Storytellers don't run out of stories, they just run out of time.

It is not the ink and the paper that matter, but the hand that holds the pen.

One thing that is almost always said to me is, I grew up with you. They are meeting me and feel that they actually grew up with me. I was with them during their play hours and thinking hours. I was a part of their childhoods. That's one of the most amazing things.

Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people. —JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, INDUSTRIALIST AND PHILANTHROPIST

Picturing the good things that will happen if you act more constructively can serve as an incentive to change.

increase their sales,

If you can't find an actual partner or monitor, try conjuring the image of a loving parent, grandparent, friend or teacher—someone you would not want to disappoint, and whom you can imagine saying, "Good work, you're doing great!" when you finally do what you've been avoiding. Even if only imagined, the support of another person can be the key to getting done what you would otherwise put off.