Quotes About Inspiration

Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life

God thinks within geniuses, dreams within poets, and sleeps within the rest of us.

2 Timothy 47.

paraphrasing it. Secondly, his approach to literature is overwhelmingly moral; its purpose is to teach us about life, to transmit humane

Watching Nicholson talking Towne was like listening to Bob Dylan playing with the Band.

Why do anything unless it is going to be great?

In summary, (1) one gets complete with the past, which takes it out of the future (being complete with the past is not to forget the past); (2) in the room that is now available in the future when one's being and action are no longer shaped by the past, one creates a future (a future that moves, touches, and inspires one); (3) that future starts to shape one's being and actions in the present so that they are consistent with realizing that future.

change. Each of us has a free will at our core, so like it or not, others will choose to change more readily from the example set by our own transformation than by any demand we make of them.

One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, Have a nice day.

You become a director by calling yourself a director and you then persuade other people that this is true.

It's easy to give up, and that's the one thing we cannot do. That's what gives me a reason for working: to leave people with a little more courage, with a little hope that has been nourished. Even if, of course, it's going to disappear, whatever touches one isn't lost forever.

There is no resting place; you have to keeping trying to get it all down on the page. Silence threatens: as for Balzac's fictional Dante, writing is a constant skirmish with nothingness.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

It's perfectly possible to enjoy a good, civilized, person-to-person conversation with a picture on a museum wall. Talk to it, listen carefully, and it will more than likely talk back to you.

Only to read their letters, notes and poems, not to see them smiling … They distilled their wisdom in writing, not in prizes … For a kind of heavenly sense made clear, for an hour, deep inside us: That's why we read the wise.

I do feel like I have important, beautiful things to say about the world, I just can't think of them at this particular instant.

It's beautiful to transcend generations and to just be inside an artistic work, together, enjoying what only a great artistic work can provide.

I feel pretty good about it so far, but it's been a little harder to write than I'd hoped.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.