Quotes about Inspiration

Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate.

What she said in To the Lighthouse of Lily Briscoe's art she might have said of her own: that the pen was 'the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos . . .',73 and the godlike power she felt as a writer is perfectly embodied in a passage from that novel.

The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God.

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

A tree trunk the size of a man grows from a blade as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small heap of earth.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'

Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.

The best thing about dreams is that youth holds on to them.

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.