Quotes about Inspiration

Oh, God, You have given me a vacant soul, an untaught conscience, a life of clay. Put Your big hands around mine and guide my hands as a teacher guides the childish fingers that hold their first crayon, so that everytime I make a mark on this life, it will be Your mark. When my hands mold this clay, may the impressions be, in reality, made by the movement of Your hands and directed by Your perfect thoughts.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

All good novelists have bad memories.

Writing is a form of therapy… Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation

The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to. I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

Our lives are the only Bible some people will ever read. Christians are to be living epistles, written by God and read by men (2 Cor. 3:2).