All Quotes By Tag: Inspiration

“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. ”

“Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.”

“Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.”

“The whales do not sing because they have an answer, they sing because they have a song.”

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”

“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”

“Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put together.You can do it.”

“The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. ”

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It’s not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today’s Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn’t particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”

“Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”

“Writing is something that you don’t know how to do. You sit down and it’s something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It’s beyond me, because you yourself don’t even know if you’re going to be able to. I’m always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I’ll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don’t go up there to write. The typewriter’s up there. If it doesn’t start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

“You’re better than this. Better than whatever it is you’re going to do now.”

“If you had started doing anything two weeks ago, by today you would have been two weeks better at it.”

“For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.”