Alice Walker Quotes

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

Wait a second while I take a swig off this bottle: it's my true and only Helicon, my Caballine fount, my sole Enthusiasm. Here, drinking, I deliberate, I reason, I resolve and conclude. After the epilogue I laugh, I write, I compose, I drink. Ennius drinking would write, writing would drink.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.

Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.

I can certainly be surprised by turns a story takes, but usually not once I'm actually in the writing/drawing stage. In the plotting stage, anything can happen. That's why I try to finish that part before I start writing. I may be exaggerating here - I'm sure there are times when I think of something part-way through that changes the story, but the ultimate outcome doesn't change. Or not yet. It could always happen.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.