“You have to spend a couple hours every day building up an arsenal of ideas. I call it a song palette. As a composer, you have to bring in different materials to inspire you. It could be books of photographs, books of wood carving, different web sites you go to; it could be a TV show you’ve gotten hooked on—something that sparks some story in your head. Whatever these things are that stimulate you, you don’t devour them like a locust devours and leaves nothing in its wake. You do bring it into your metaphorical paint box—whether you’re writing it down, highlighting words, developing character traits: your metaphorical palette can exist in your notebook with chalks and pens or on a computer.”
-Tori Amos, From Tori Amos: Piece by Piece
“The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step.”
-Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”
-Stephen King
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
