Quotes About Inspiration

OK, now write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, tell me what you carry.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

And what great writers actually pass on is not so much their words, but they hand on their breath at their moments of inspiration.

I'm sorry I don't have brilliant reasons for beginning a novel. As you go along, you make up reasons to do what you want. There's an open space. Enter it.

Let some of the good writing go. Don't worry. There'll be lots of it over time. You can't use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go.

We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.

Explore the rugged edge of thought . Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.

Keep your hand moving. (Don't pause to reread the line you have just written. That's stalling and trying to get control of what you're saying.)

It's good to go off and write a novel, but don't stop doing writing practice.

If every time you sat down, you expected something great, writing would always be a great disappointment. Plus that expectation would also keep you from writing.

Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.

How to generate writing ideas, things to write about? Whatever's in front of you is a good beginning. Then move out into all streets. You can go anyplace. Tell me everything you know. Don't worry if what you know you can't prove or haven't studied.

Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should

Writing is 100% listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. if you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else.

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 coloured sensation and keep your pen moving across the page.

Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don't worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north—just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.

Write in different places—for example, in a laundromat, and pick up on the rhythm of the washing machines. Write at bus stops, in cafés. Write what is going on around you.

Visualize a place that you really love, be there, see the details. Now write about it.

Why else are first thoughts so energizing? Because they have to do with freshness and inspiration. Inspiration means "breathing in." Breathing in God. You actually become larger than yourself, and first thoughts are present. They are not a cover-up of what is actually happening or being felt. The present is imbued with tremendous energy. It is what is.

this quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well.

To read and to write is to be empowered. No shackle can ultimately hold you.

Lighting a candle helps create a sense of magic.

and though death is howling at our backs and life is roaring at our faces, we can just begin to write, simply begin to write what we have to say.

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.