Quotes About Inspiration

Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

Murakami is not here anyway, I thought. He is most likely somewhere else, sealed in a space capsule in the center of a field of lavender, laboring over words.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.

I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." His manifesto as an artist.

To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.

Most of the time, it seemed as if the piece was fully formed in his mind. He was not one for improvising. It was more a question of executing something he saw in a flash.

El taxi llega tan rápido que no me da tiempo a elegir qué libros llevarme. La perspectiva de embarcar en un avión sin un libro me produce una oleada de pánico. El libro adecuado puede ser una especie de maestro, que marca el tono o incluso altera el curso de un viaje.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold

I feel a real responsibility to the images I get attached to.

We never saw beyond New York save in books and never sat in an airplane holding each other's hand to ascend into a new sky and descend onto a new Earth. Yet Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other.

We lost contact with Ed but a decade later he was with me in an unexpected way. As I approached the microphone with my electric guitar to sing the opening line "So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star," I remembered his words. Small prophecies.

All writers are bums...

Gregory [Corso] made lists of books for me to read, told me the best dictionary to own, encouraged and challenged me. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

We are guided by roses, the scent of a page.

Varför skriver vi? En kör av röster väller fram. För att vi inte bara kan leva.

Varför måste man skriva? För att ställa sig vid sidan om, som i en kokong, försjunken i ensamhet, på trots mot andras behov. Virginia Woolf hade sitt rum. Proust sina stängda fönsterluckor. Marguerite Duras sitt tysta hus. Dylan Thomas sin enkla bod. Alla var de ute efter en tomhet att fylla med ord. Orden som ska tränga in i orörda marker, uppdaga oinmutade associationer, ge uttryck åt oändligheten.

Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds. The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.

Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.

The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away.

I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling — confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph — and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer's debris.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?