Quotes About Inspiration

Yesterday is already a dream And tomorrow but a vision But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Nobody writes a book. What you write every day is a piece of a book, a fragment, a scene.

The fastest way to write is to pretend you have all the time in the world.

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.

As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.

And, between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.

Emerson used India to formulate his philosophy, and India used Emerson to legitimize its ancient wisdom to the modern mind.

Why does God call people to be artists? Because he is an Artist, and we are made in his image. When we first meet the God of the Bible, he is busy making things and calling them good. Thus it is only natural for him to take some of the people that he has made, call them to be artists, and hold them to an aesthetic standard.

Artists are called and gifted-personally, by name-to write, paint, sing, play, and dance to the glory of God.

Moses was a prophet, but the tabernacle needed an artist.

The composer Igor Stravinsky wisely said, "I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received."3

Life, not lectures, inspires us to change.

People did not come to God through Jesus as much as they saw the priorities of God in Jesus.

There is a certain transcendent joy in creating a thing of beauty. But even more fulfilling is to become a being of beauty.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

One doesnt write about anything. One just writes.

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.

Surely the stars are images of love.

All architects want to live beyond their deaths.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

I've come to believe that in life it's best to live for a purpose greater than oneself.

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.