Idea: Inspiration

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / July 9, 2016

They asked Newton* how he did it and he’s supposed to have said,

I thought about it all the time.

* Yes, it’s Archimedes. Keep reading.

Inspiration is for amateurs. Chuck Close

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. Jack London

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. Picasso

Inspiration is a word used by people who aren’t really doing anything. I go into my office every day that I’m in Brighton and work. Whether I feel like it or not is irrelevant. Nick Cave

If you wait for inspiration you’re not a writer you’re a waiter. Dan Poynter

Inspiration usually comes during work, not before it. Madeleine L’Engle

No sensible person would deny … the mystery of inspiration. But … it is useless to depend on [it]. All prose responds to work. Tracy Kidder

Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration. Ralph Keyes

Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration. Stravinsky

I write when I’m inspired. I make sure I’m inspired every morning at 9 am. Peter DeVries

There then a thing to think about.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.] One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Random

True Romance

Mentioned last week the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term used in film to refer to a female — not a woman, mark you, but a girl or perhaps female, depending on the level of [im]maturity — who exists in a story not for herself, more deeply not as a Self, but only for the

Syllogism

Premise: If a story, then a storyteller. Premise: A story. Conclusion: A storyteller.

It’s Alright, I Am A Jerk

Don’t drive angry. And don’t drive ignorant. That’s the lesson of the Bill Murray movie, eponymous to the name of yesterday’s Punxsutawney festivities. The movie is now 20 years old, and still has an 8.1 ranking at IMDB from nearly a quarter million users. Watching the movie is a ritual now, like “Elf” or “A Christmas

Duo

… More then says because he’s in prison and only has a coal with which to write he can’t respond fully to the view that one ought harm an evil man lest he cause even greater harm to such as are innocent and good. But He counsels us that even if it be our formal office to punish an evil

Related

God a Day

My sister gave me a “page-a-day” calendar for Christmas. Michele’s not as fond of them, because of all the paper I think she says. For me, it seems the perfect item: you tear one off, and bam! you’re done. Though it is a lot of paper … But mine is Bible verses, and it’s a

If You Were Stranded On A Desert Island

What song would you sing?

The Country for Old Men

Walter Hartwell White is going to hell. Whatever else happens — whoever dies in the shootout, no matter what-all happens in the final three episodes, whatever he’s planning to do with the ricin recovered from his burned out house — that’s a fact. In fact, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said that was the point, one which

All Hat No Cattle

The men I respected most when I wrote about the golf business — and being the golf business they were mostly men — were course superintendents. I loved talking with them, because they more than nearly anyone else wanted to be there simply for the grass and the golfers, and in that order. And this