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Creative Inspiration Quotes

Browse 11 quotes about Creative Inspiration.

Creative Inspiration Quotes

“But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?”

“Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where they come from and nobody should know. They evolve in the air, they float down from some mysterious heaven and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . .”

“Proponents of established norms often push rules like 'Write what you know' on new writers. In truth, everything we write is about us, whether we realise it or not. The texts and subtexts we create are layered with our worldview, imagination, passions, sense of humour, blind spots, biases, and fears. In my novel 'The Vorbing,' the opening vampire attack was something I only understood years later as my way of dealing with PTSD from a real violent incident, proving how our personal experiences shape our writing in ways we might not even notice.”

“Silence is the great teacher and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence.”