Quotes about Inspiration

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power—the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

Did you want to be a missionary in your youth? I did. I think most kids do some time or another, which is odd, seein how unsatisfactory most of us turn out.

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …

The agents of the miraculous which the novelist has at his command are, roughly speaking, conversion and coincidence;

Francis Bacon," said Peter, a trifle belatedly. "Mr. Kirk, you're a man after my own heart.

I'm all for scattering sunshine as we pass. As Stevenson says, we shall pass this way but once--and I devoutly hope he's right.

Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement? Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day — for a bit, anyhow.

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.