Quotes About Inspiration

Because that's what fantasy is, isn't it?" he demanded. "Not just making things up, but taking ideas and giving them hands and feet and claws and teeth!

Pathos is sad and inspires pity, but is not very interesting because there is nothing to learn from it; the audience experiences mostly pity and futility.

You are everything good and straight and fine and true—and I see that so clearly now, in the way you've carried yourself and listened to your own heart. You've changed me more than you know, and will always be a part of everything I am. That's one thing I've learned from this. No one you love is ever truly lost.

The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

Real writing, I was beginning to realize, was more like laying bricks than waiting for lightning to strike. It was painstaking. It was manual labor. And sometimes, sometimes if you kept putting the bricks down and let your hands just go on bleeding, and didn't look up and didn't stop for anything, the lightning came. Not when you prayed for it, but when you did your work.

it struck me how comfortable I felt with him, as if we were old friends or had already done this many times over, him handing me pages with his heart on his sleeve - he couldn't pretend this work didn't mean everything to him - me reading his words, quietly amazed by what he could do.

Young writers, they're almost always autobiographical, even when they don't mean to be.

What do you mean to do?' 'Make literary history, I guess.

I have so many schemes about writing – so much I want to see and feel and do.

What are you thinking? Just of how much you've changed me. This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

You're making something new. Don't forget that when it starts to hurt.

Have you ever seen stars like this? You can't have. They don't make them like this anywhere in the world." Above our heads, the sky was a brimming treasure box. Some of the stars seemed to want to pull free and leap down onto my shoulders—and though these were the only ones I had ever known,

Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

Perhaps I will begin by walking where he has walked." Arap

This is why there is poetry. For days like these.

I'm beginning to think you couldn't make up a woman like this except as a character in a movie.

Something was missing in my life—in me—and I thought writing could fill it or fix it, or cure me of myself.

If I were any kind of water," Eden said, staring out and out, "I'd want to be this ocean." You already are, I wanted to tell her. You're everything I can see.

to stitch my name on the sky

I want to write something, but I don't think I can without being emotional." "Just make a start. Begin anywhere." "It might be terrible." "It might be. That's not the worst thing." "No," I agreed. And it wasn't. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.

Mary Lovell's Straight On Till Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham was the first biography to bring Beryl to light, in 1987, and her pioneering efforts and careful research have been crucial to my own and other writers' abilities to imagine Beryl's life. Mary Lovell also compiled Beryl Markham's stories in The Splendid Outcast, a collection that wouldn't have been available otherwise, and for that

This is your life's work for a reason. The things you've lost have drawn you to help these children and young women. I think you know that already, but you can't see what I can.

Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas.

Adults are always asking children what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas.