Inspiration Fade Quotes

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness.

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?

He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn't paint me anymore.

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.

You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it... The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling.

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?