Quotes about Inspiration

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Write the truest sentence you know. Then write another. -- Hemingway's advice to other young writers in A Moveable Feast.

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That's all, he said. You see how simple what you cannot do is?

We're all broken that's how the light gets in.

Can you imagine anyone making wine because it tastes like strawberries?

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.