Amity Gaige Quotes

I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I find that my reading, particularly nonfiction, can inspire a poem as well as anything else.

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 inspired by nonmusical things a lot, whether it's a film or a book or whatever.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.

To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.

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

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.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

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.

You know, there's always someone in mind when I'm writing. You know, it's all comes from somewhere inside.