Charles Bukowski on Inspiration

Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it. Charles Bukowski

Chuck Close on Inspiration

Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work -Chuck Close

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.

If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: "Leave no stone unturned." Edward Bulwer Lytton

If you would create something, you must be something. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.
Horace Bushnell

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps, till the legend, over steep ways to the stars, fulfills itself. W. C. Doane

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action. Benjamin Disraeli

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? George Eliot

No great man ever complains of want of opportunities. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can. Thomas Carlyle

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. Harriet Tubman

All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. T.E. Lawrence

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Eleanor Roosevelt

Commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer. Marcia Wieder

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
Paul Valery

A skillful man reads his dreams for self-knowledge, yet not the details but the quality.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hope is the dream of the waking man. French Proverb

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores. William Shakepear