Would Be Literary Inspiration Quotes & Sayings

Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work. — Ambrose Bierce

If you can't write, read.
If you can't read, walk.
Or walk and read, then write. — Joyce Rachelle

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-perso n, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener — Marshall McLuhan

There exists an oasis where inspiration bursts forth like black gold from the fertile loam and every odd bellbird chirps a melody worth remembering. There's no bloody map or nautical chart that can deliver you there, but you know the instant you've arrived because you never ever want to depart. — Adam G. Tarsitano

Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier
what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in
that's here to stay. — Anthony Bourdain

She let her mind drift, thinking about new lingerie designs, wishing she'd brought along her sketchpad. Inspiration could strike at the most inconvenient times--in the shower, in the car, on this road--but she was grateful it was with her again, an old companion with whom she was getting reacquainted, pleased to find they could take up where they'd left off, as if there'd been no estrangement at all. — Heather Barbieri

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ... — Joseph Conrad

As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling. — Arjun Rampal

Imagine the literary buff, steeped in his beloved classics, rejoicing in a memory that sings, prepared to dispense kilowatts of goodwill, who fetches up at the Odeon on an off day. There are days like that, when everything rings hollow, and even the hollowness is unconvincing. There's nothing to be done about it: the inspiration's not there. He's left with a terrible sense of disappointment, resentment, against whom he doesn't exactly know: the playwright or the actors? All he can do is curl up in bed, alone, all alone, and console himself with suitably wrought alexandrines. — Jacques Yonnet

You know how sometimes you remember a place you once loved, a movie you've enjoyed, only to be disappointed when you return to that place or see that movie for a second time? Well, it wasn't disappointing. She sounds exactly as I remember her - and there is still something so warm and caring about her that it is difficult to hate her for how she abandoned us. — Christina Westover

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself. — Hale White

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast. — Lauren Oliver

Inspirasi tak mengenal kata mati
There is no death for inspiration. — Skylashtar Maryam

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years. — Aberjhani

Childbirth takes place at the intersection of time; in all cultures it links past, present and future. In traditional cultures birth unites the world of 'now' with the world of the ancestors, and is part of the great tree of life extending in time and eternity. — Sheila Kitzinger

He attempted to distract his thoughts from the events that were overwhelming him by going over his papers. These were the sum total of his literary output over the last fifteen years. In the early days he had harbored an inflated idea as to the merit of his work and had even enjoyed publication in magazines that nobody read. It was only later that he discovered he preferred to write for himself alone and not for the dubious pleasure of seeing his strange works in print. He liked to dream over them, writing only when inspiration came to him, which was infrequently, and the half-formed pieces and the false starts were either destroyed or subsumed into longer writings - of which there were few. He enjoyed destroying the work that did not satisfy him. Sometimes he even wondered if he actually wrote just so he could obliterate the results. — Mark Samuels

Inhale when I inhale. Exhale when I exhale. Breathe with me,for two beating hearts breathing one breath together become one. — Christina Westover

That's what I've always found so pathetic about fans. They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they're impervious to doing anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, 'Huey' - it was his nickname for me - 'Huey, they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not courage. It's all just entertainment. — Marisha Pessl

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties. — Aberjhani

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment. — Jon Meacham

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn't work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer's real world and the writer's fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It's world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache. — David Mitchell

What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer ... from a thousand questions? — G.F. Smith

Intrinsic to the concept of a translator's fidelity to the effect and impact of the original is making the second version of the work as close to the first writer's intention as possible. A good translator's devotion to that goal is unwavering. But what never should be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator's writing. The inspiration is the original work, certainly, and thoughtful literary translators approach that work with great deference and respect, but the execution of the book in another language is the task of the translator, and that work should be judged and evaluated on its own terms. Still, most reviewers do not acknowledge the fact of translation except in the most perfunctory way, and a significant majority seem incapable of shedding light on the value of the translation or on how it reflects or illuminates the original. — Edith Grossman

A god is anything that lives outside of God. — Anthony Liccione

Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent. — Dr. Seuss

Once in a rare while, you get to read a story of such breathtaking beauty and intelligence that you remember why you love to read. The Anatomy Lesson is just such a novel. In stunning prose, Nina Siegal animates Rembrandt's first masterpiece, spinning a deeply affecting tale of love, loss and redemption as she reveals the secrets of the human soul. It is a gorgeous literary page turner of immense sympathy and elegance, equal in artistic lan to its inspiration. Brava! — Robin Oliveira

For popular purposes, at least, the aim of literary artists should be similar to that of Rubens in his landscapes, of which, without neglecting the minor traits or finishing, he was chiefly solicitous to present the leading effect, or what we may call the inspiration. — William Benton Clulow

Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example — Robert Lane Greene

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can't pick up a page. All the words slide off. — William H Gass

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth. — Aberjhani

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. — Willa Cather