"I think extravagance in your life takes the energy from possible extravagances in your mind."

"Read. This one sounds like a luxury, but if you fail to refill the well of inspiration, how will you be inspired to write words of your own?'

"Where it all came from—the other mother with her button eyes, the rats, the hand, the sad voices of the ghost-children—I have no real idea. It built itself and told itself, a word at a time."

"We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don't know."

"What loafing does for my creative process: I get many of my brainstorms when I'm doing something totally unrelated to the diligence of the butt-in-chair calcified advice that many new writers receive."

"Reading is fuel for the imagination.  Reading is inspiring.  Reading is relaxing.  Reading is a way to keep this 'art' part of your brain active between writing sessions."

"I have always wanted to write mysteries, ever since I was a little girl growing up in rural Indiana.  We used to ride our ponies to the library and fill up the saddlebags with books, and then read up on the hayloft of the barn behind our house.  I fell in love with Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Drew.  And that's when I decided I wanted to either be a detective or a mystery author."

"Good fiction is not trying to imitate life or trying to reproduce what's going on in life.  Life serves as a catalyst, as a provocation that leads to something fictional that's interesting.  It creates a new world that has its own constraints, its own rules, and its own system that can really be intersting in and of itself.  It can also come back and teach us something about life.  There is a constantly circulating movement in the interchange between life and fiction."

"Stay curious, look for inspiration in everything, and write it down.  You never know when you have a seed that you'll come back to."

"Ever since my childhood I always feel someone is standing with me when I work.  It guides and leads me, and criticizes what I have painted.  It calls my attention to the beauty of anything that could be the personification of sensibility.  I am not sure what it is, but it is always there."

"That's what it’s like when you're creating things. On the one hand, it really seems like you're keeping it all moving on your own, and you can tell yourself that you've got inspiration raining down on you, but ultimately you can't make anything happen on your own."

"Every idea that you fall in love with is a gift. How the ideas come is the trick."

"Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it."

"What we all have in us ... t it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice.  When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh.  How strange—we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.  The Muse, to belabor the point then, is there, a fantastic storehouse, our complete being.  All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth."

"Questioning is key to essay writing—it's usually what gets the piece moving."

"Being creatively satisfied means that you possess the faith that as you connect the dots of your inspiration, bridges will form—and yet more dots will appear.  Once you settle into the idea that that can continue forever, then you are satisfied knowing that there will always be something that draws you in, compels you, and drives you to look closer.  There will always be another way to express yourself.  It's a dance that never ends."

"With creative people ... there are always intrusions, hints or clues from ways of thinking that certainly appear foreign, and creative people use those hints and clues to construct an art, a musical composition or whatever. They sense a surge of power beneath."

"The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day."  

"Of all the things I've learned about writing, this is the most important: There's a domain of excitement and eagerness and delight that can be astonishing.  It is a place of commitment and discovery and wonderment.  It is the far side of passion.  It is totality of purpose, an inspired obsession.  I like to call it stardrive.  It's the engine at the center of your personal starship.  It's your heart of brightness.  It is who you really are.  It is simply you—you are the source."

"The ongoing professionalization of writing, an outcome of our neoliberal moment, has acted centrifugally on writers, clotting them together in ways that are unprecedented.  I tend to spend more time with readers.  What truly enriches my creative life are folks who do anything other than writing. ... And books, of course.  I don't need much else to inspire me as long as I have books."

"In reaching for the unknown—in that middle realm, somewhere between what I understand and what I have never before imagined—I feel the spark of inspiration begin to glow."

"My ideas drove me to it, you see.  The more I did, the more I wanted to do.  You grow ravenous.  You run fevers.  You know exhilarations.  You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed.  It is a grand way to live."

"Time-based work doesn't make as much sense as it once did, as ideas are not 'things' and can't be measured in units. An idea, conceived in just a moment, can have enormous implications. Thus an 'idea person' has a more flexible approach to time. She learns how to develop the special, and often quite eccentric, circumstances that encourage creativity, and to trust inspiration when it appears—no matter what the time. "

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

Zen in the Art of Writing

"Sometimes inspiration strikes and we sit down to write. But a writer knows the reverse is more common. We start to write and the ideas come."

The View from the Cheap Seats

Ray Bradbury - "Telling the Truth"

"Inspiration is another name for knowing your job and getting down to it."

"The books a writer reads are so important; they form a compost bed beneath the rosebushes of her own writing."

"Explaining what you do and how you do it to the young and enthusiastic, while showing them how to nurture their own talents, can reignite your own writing passion."

"There are no mistakes in art.  There are accidents—and accidents can lead to something new."

"What great writers do is practice the art of looking for the Undiscovered Countries inside every story—because every book ever written is just a torch being carried into an incredibly deep, incredibly dark cavern of the imagination, illuminating only a small portion of the potential ideas it contains.  What remains hidden in the shadows is a rich source of inspiration for your own work—if you know how to mine it."

"Writing is my joy, but not alwasy; much of the time it is my job, and I have to write whether I feel like it or not, whether inspiration strikes or not.  That is how you make a story unfold."

"You're doing what you want to do because you're curious about that idea.  My motivation for writing has always been curiosity.  I prefer to write about things that I know a little about, but not a whole lot about."

"Creativity is how I process the world, but curiosity is the spark that sets it in motion."

"Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."

"You have to retain a sense of childlike wonder."

"I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.  I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you... Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.  And out of that love, remake a world."

"I don't really believe in that whole 'wait for the muse to strike' thing.  I'm more of a 'sit your ass in a chair and start typing' guy."

"Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too."

"There's no upside to holding back plot.  ....  If you've got a great idea, that great idea doesn't wait until season two.  It goes in the third act.  You can keep inventing more plot, but you can't invent more audience.  You have to have the faith in yourself... that there will be another good idea."

"Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don't schedule it.  It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this." (artist)

"Curiosity creates a sort of brain vortex that sucks in whatever you feel most motivated to learn, along with ideas that may be floating around your environment.  The spark of curiosity lights up the hippocampus (where the creation of memories occurs), and the reward and pleasure brain circuits, which release dopamine.  So if you want an alert brain, start your day by immersing yourself in something you find fascinating and mysterious.  Pique your curiosity, enjoy the natural high and learn something new."

"Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work."

"You have to write when you're not 'inspired.' ...And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year later, you're going to look back and you're not going to remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to be written."

"I don't believe in inspiration.  I believe that you sit at your desk, and you push your pencil around, and you feel lousy about yourself for a while, and eventually, you just start writing.  Everyone I know who's lucky in this business is lucky because they're working really hard, and then good stuff happens."

"Breaks give your mind a chance to refresh.  I write multiple books at once, and I'm always thinking about them, even if I'm not at a computer.  It's a habit I picked up as a litigator: You have 1,000 facts in your head, and the most important thing isn't that you know them all- it's that you crystallize them, so that you can present them clearly.  Epiphanies don't occur like a spark; they're actually ideas that have been floating around in your brain for a while.  By the time I sit down to write, my thoughts are well organized and come out cleanly."

"Writing is not about the muse, or the writer's soul—it's about getting words on paper every day, whether a few words or a few pages."

"Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse.  It cannot be done.  You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"I know nothing at all.  Nothing.  The first line comes and I start.  I always thought that I began with something talking to me, but I realized it's not true.  I begin by seeing something and then it's translated into a voice talking to me and then I follow it and see where it will go."

"Stop mythologizing the life of a writer.  Don't wait for the muse to whisper in your ear.  Don't cultivate an affected personality.  Put your butt in a chair and write.  A writer is no different than a plumber, a landscaper or a dental hygienist.  We are doing what we are called to do and what we are suited for.  You don't need to escape to a cabin and write in a parchment diary with a special pen. Sit at a Starbucks or at home or in the middle of traffic and just write."