James Tate Quotes

When something comes to my brain, I don't ignore it. You never know what it's going to turn into.

I get lost in my right brain, especially in creative things.

Ideas are all around you - everything gives you ideas. But the real source is the part of your brain that dreams.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

I like to have books around to give me ideas-to get the verbal part of my brain to start working.

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write; but how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me, Excepting Original Sin.

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

Ideas come from somewhere. People don't come up with these ideas from nowhere. Something triggers your thoughts.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

The more life you have, the more it's in your pores, the more able you are to be creative as an artist.

Indolence, of course, is an absolutely crucial part of the creative process: you do not find poets sitting in rows in cavernous word factories, staring at screens. They are rather to be found lolling on the sofa or strolling through the groves, nursing their melancholic temperaments and losing themselves in extended reveries.

I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

I try to live instinctively. And I guess I've always enjoyed living in a fantasy world, daydreaming.

I get inspiration from my everyday life.