Quotations about Writers and Intuition

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

If you are going to write you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently and with self-trust. If you once become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don’t know it, it doesn’t do you any good.

Brenda Ueland

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

Anne Sexton

Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Anne Lamott

At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously –I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

John Keats

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.

Allen Ginsberg

It’s all about letting the story take over.

Robert Stone

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you’re doing it and when you’re dreaming, it’s doing you.

Robert Stone

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.

Allan Gurganus

I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don’t know where it comes from.

D.H. Lawrence

Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it.

Anne Rice

The unconscious creates, the ego edits.

Stanley Kunitz

The imagination has resources and intimations we don’t even know about.

Cynthia Ozick

…perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild – both the wild inside and the wild outside us – and to tap into it.

Anne Rivers Siddons

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.

Saul Bellow

Dreams raise the emotional level of what I’m doing at the moment.

Maurice Sendak

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

Jessamyn West

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Leonardo da Vinci

The dancer becomes the dance. And I am the writing.

Louis L’Amour

It is my heart that makes songs, not I.

Sara Teasdale

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

William Faulkner

All writing is dreaming

Jorge Luis Borges

I truly think that you can’t go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can’t go and wrestle it to the ground.

Louise Erdrich

A mind too active is no mind at all.

Theodore Roethke

Read carefully, then don’t read; work hard, then forget about it; know your tradition, then liberate yourself from it; learn language, then free yourself from it. Finally, know at least one form of magic.

Gary Snyder

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

Rachel Carson

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.

Ovid

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It’s getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is.

Maurice Sendak

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

Brenda Uleland

You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born…

Ranier Maria Rilke

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a reality beyond words…by means of art we are sometimes sent – dimly, briefly – revelations unattainable by reason.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than you headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E.L. Doctorow

Without imagination of the one kind or of the other, moral existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic business…Illumined by the imagination, or life – whatever its defeats – is a never-ending unforeseen strangeness and adventure and mystery.

Walter De La Mare

As soon as you accept the accidental effects, they are no longer accidents. They are necessity – the part of yourself that you could not expect or design beforehand. Thus the realm of your creativity grows wider.

Kazuaki Tanahashi

It is with fine sentiments that bad literature is made. Descend to the bottom of the well if you wish to see the stars.

Andre Gide

For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?

Descartes

All Nature is but art, unknown to thee; All Chance, direction which thou canst not see.

Alexander Pope

…Intuition works best when you remember that 'tuition' is part of it. You need to have paid ahead of time (i.e. Done your prep work ) so as to prepare the ground for intuition.

Jane Yolen