Writers Speak On Inspiration And Imagination

“Imagination grows by exercise and, contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.”  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph, that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute.”  FRANKLIN P. ADAMS

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”  SAUL BELLOW

“Imagination, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.”  AMBROSE BIERCE

“Many characters have come to me… in a dream, and then I’ll elaborate from there. I always write down all my dreams.”  WILLIAM BURROUGHS

“Divine fires do not blaze each day, but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence.” NED ROREM

“I’ve always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.”  DORIS LESSING

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”  FREDRICH W. NIETZSCHE

“Inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact; a work of craft.”  ANTHONY BURGESS

“The devil himself always seems to get into my inkstand, and I can only exorcise him by pensful at a time.” NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

“Sometimes you can lick an especially hard problem by facing it always the very first thing in the morning with the very freshest part of your mind.”  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

“Anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted.”   THOMAS STEARNS ELLIOT

“Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion – the oily rags of the head and heart.”  STANLEY ELKIN

“I don’t know why my imagination takes me where it does. I just feel so lucky to get a single idea for a novel that I can write about. When I get one, my ruminations and daydreaming grow and lead to other things, and I feel that there is a book there.”  JOSEPH HELLER

“When they come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.”  JACK KEROUAC

“Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write: examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied to you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write.” RAINER MARIA RILKE

“Poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.”  JOHN ASHBERY

“When I want to get going I read Faulkner. It’s good because you can’t write like him.”   KEN KESEY

“I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.”  WILLIAM FAULKNER

“When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it’s going to be till I’m under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. But I don’t sit back waiting for it. I work every day.”   ALBERTO MORAVIA