Quotes About Inspiration

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

What Whitney Houston has accomplished will never be accomplished. She's the most famous person on the planet as far as vocaling and her songs. So I'm very happy that I can sit here and say I had a chance to know her. And I'm still dazed that she's gone. But she lives because her music is so powerful.

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. "When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral," said Carl Hiaasen—and he writes comic novels.

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart. 12 MINDFUL MENOPAUSE Can We Live Without Estrogen?

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart.

I'm not exactly sure what I'd do, you know, but something interesting - something that's all mine. Something that would make some kind of difference in the world. It'd be nice to have a new name, to start with, one that's not all worn out from being called so much.

I)n reading . . . stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

If you're having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up -- to know that there's life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can't find it anywhere else.

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.

If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don't think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.

When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing." (p.90)

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

I met a doctor the other night who told me he had always wanted to be a writer. I nodded. People always tell me that...Then I thought to myself, 'You know, I've never met a writer who wanted to be anything else. They might bitch about something they're writing or about their poverty, but they never say they want to quit...and if they do abandon it they become crazy, drunk or suicidal.' Writing is elemental.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

You have to let writing eat your life and follow it where it takes you. You fit into it; it doesn't fit neatly into your life. It makes you wild.