Words of Inspiration

The cliché is true in art as it is in engineering: we build upon the work of those who precede us. Yet there are innovators in every field and a few of them are represented below. In some cases, the quotations provide the inspiration for my blog.

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Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. — Franz Kafka (See my comments)

Please imagine an explosion on a ship. — William S. Burroughs opening sentence in “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” (See my comments)

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original. — Jean Cocteau (See my comments)

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market. — Ezra Pound (See my comments)

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. — Samuel Johnson (See my comments)

Art is a way of knowing — Pat Allen (See my comments)

The most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. — Albert Einstein (See my comments)

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. — Marie Curie (See my comments)

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. — Mario Vargas Llosa (See my comments)

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. — Charles Baudelaire (See my comments)

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth. — Marcel Proust, Meditations (See my comments)

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives. — Johann Friedrich Von Schiller (See my comments)

Celebrity is just Obscurity biding its time. — Carrie Fisher (See my comments)

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. — Toni Morrison (See my comments)

At spare moments of the day, make it a point to contemplate the loss of whatever you value in life. Engaging in such contemplation can produce a dramatic transformation in your outlook on life. It can make you realize, if only for a time, how lucky you are. — William Braxton Irvine (See my comments)

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.
— Gabriel García Márquez (See my comments)

The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings. — Terence James Stannus Gray (a.k.a. Wei Wu Wei) (See my comments)

By becoming attached to names and forms, not realizing that they have no more basis than the activities of the mind itself, error rises and the way to emancipation is blocked. — Buddha (See my comments)

Your constant utilization of thought to give continuity to your separate self is ‘you.’ There is nothing there inside you other than that. — U.G. Krishnamurti (See my comments)

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. — Ernest Hemingway (See my comments)

There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen. — R. Gordon Wasson (See my comments)

There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being. — Albert Einstein (See my comments)

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place. — Rainer Maria Rilke (See my comments)

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (See my comments)

I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. — Allen Ginsberg (See my comments)

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. — Franz Kafka (See my comments)

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

- Emily Dickinson, in LIFE, XI (See my comments)

It took me way beyond what I knew, into places of which I was totally scared, but as I became less frightened, I welcomed new ways of thinking and approaching something. It made me an infinitely richer person, and I think a better musician.—Yo-Yo Ma (See my comments)

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. — Pablo Picasso (See my comments)

Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off). — J.R.R. Tolkien

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. — Barbara W. Tuchman

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. — Derek Walcott

Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a ‘natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon. — Maya Angelou

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. — Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives. — Vladimir Nabokov

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. — Pearl S. Buck

In the middle of life it happens that death comes and measures man. The visit is forgotten and life continues. But the suit is made, quietly. — Tomas Tranströmer

The outer storm ceases the moment the inner storm ends, for they are the same storm. — Vernon Howard

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
— E.M. Forster

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
— Lawrence Durrell

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.— Charles Bukowski

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. — Oscar Wilde

In a sense, the first ... function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. — Brigid Brophy

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.— Anita Desai

Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. — Erica Jong

I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head. — Roman Payne

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.— Paul Auster

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction. — Toni Morrison

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. — Tom Stoppard

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard. — John Steinbeck

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath

You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark. — Giovanni Boccaccio

The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently, and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken. — Homer

Life should be an aim unto itself; a purpose unto itself. — Montaigne

The community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation. — Gabriel García Márquez

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!” — Jack Kerouac

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose. — Charles Baudelaire

The basis of drama is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. — David Mamet

It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair. — Milan Kundera

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. — Maya Angelou

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. (Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.) — Horace

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting? — David Foster Wallace

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day. — James Joyce

We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art. — Henry James.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
— Ernest Hemingway

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. — Winston Churchill

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. — Simone de Beauvoir

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. — Ursula K. Le Guin,

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. —
Umberto Eco

The most characteristic mark of a great mind is to choose some one important object, and pursue it for life. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. ― Truman Capote

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past. — Maurice Maeterlinck

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am. — Elizabeth Bowen

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman. — Boris Pasternak

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. — Doris Lessing

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. — Leo Tolstoy

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep
— Alexander Pope

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. ― Anaïs Nin

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. — George Orwell

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time. — André Gide

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. — Allen Ginsberg

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. — Toni Morrison

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. — Walt Whitman

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. ― James Joyce

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli. — Robert Moor