Anne McCaffrey Quotes

I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

I always try, if I can, to travel before I start a writing project. For me, travelling is my education. It inspires me, and it clears my mind and allows me to come back with a cleansed palate.

I'm never short of inspiration. There are always new ideas - and new adventures.

I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

If you want to write, keep cats.

Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead . . . for in imagination, we can create wonders.

I think I still keep my sense of wonder, which I call childlike, not childish, childlike. I still have a vivid imagination, and I like to try a lot of new things.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

Everything's a film idea if this is what you do.I've always been secretly confident that I'd never run out of ideas,because I've never had any. I just live my life, see things theway I do, and I'm just looking for a notion to hang it all on.

Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.

I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.

Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with.

We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. Several new science papers suggest that getting away is an essential habit of effective thinking. When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we'd previously suppressed. We start thinking about obscure possibilitiebsthat never would have occurred to us if we'd stayed home.

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

I really like to travel when I write. Something about seeing new things and being in new cultures and environments provokes new thoughts in your head.