An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.
Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.
Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.
I didn't have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let's say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!
Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness — I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study.
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director.
Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief… Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol — pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.
Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.
The greatest inspiration is often born of desperation.
The inspiration of the almighty gives man understanding.
The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
There never was a great soul that did not have some divine inspiration.
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best — that is inspiration.
Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant, they is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
You beat your Pate, and fancy Wit will come: Knock as you please, there's no body at home.