Quotes About Inspiration

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

The day Was like the buzzard on the pine.

One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful even if it is only a floating ash.

life every now and then becomes literature...as if life had been made and not happened.

To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.

Mon vœu, quand j'ai commencé à écrire, a été d'être un écrivain roumain. Comme tant d'autres avant moi, qu'ils aient été grecs (I[on] L[uca] Caragiale, Alexandru A. Philippide), arméniens (Garabet Ibr?ileanu), juifs (Mihail Sebastian, Max Blecher) ou de bien d'autres origines, depuis le Géorgien Antim Ivireanul, jusqu'au « russe » Nichita St?nescu.

The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.

The View of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.

I'll never have enough time to paint all the pictures I'd like to.

You could be the first nation to tell your children to ask themselves what work in the world would most become their souls and to prepare to do it.

As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Understanding can overcome any situation, however mysterious or insurmountable it may appear to be.

If you have zest and enthusiasm you attract zest and enthusiasm. Life does give back in kind.

If you are not getting as much from life as you want to, then examine the state of your enthusiasm.