Inspiration Is Overrated

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

Cease trying to work everything out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be Revelation.

—Eileen Caddy

What has kept you inspired as an artist? "A fear of boredom. Just a mortal fear of boredom."

—Eric Fischl,
American painter.

For make no mistake about it, work for an artist is a highly conscious, rational process at the end of which the work of art emerges as mastered reality-- not at all a state of intoxicated inspiration.  

—Ernst Fischer

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts. 

—Italo Calvino

Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it. 

—Lisa Alther

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all. 

—Rita Mae Brown 

Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration. 

—Rudolf Nureyev

The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing. 

—Sophie Kerr

It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

—Stephen King

That talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense; there is no such thing. It is a mere matter of craftsmanship.

—William Morris

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief... Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louver! A bas l Originality, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol -- pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

—William S. Burroughs

Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write.  Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.  

—Jean Anouilh