“Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.”

“In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.”

“You can, of course, write to inspire others… but most importantly, you must write to inspire yourself.”

“If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.”

“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.”

“Beyond imagination and insight, the most important component of talent is perseverance—the will to write and rewrite in pursuit of perfection. Therefore, when inspiration sparks the desire to write, the artist immediately asks: Is this idea so fascinating, so rich in possibility, that I want to spend months, perhaps years, of my life in pursuit of its fulfillment? Is this concept so exciting that I will get up each morning with the hunger to write? Will this inspiration compel me to sacrifice all of life's other pleasures in my quest to perfect its telling? If the answer is no, find another idea. Talent and time are a writer's only assets. Why give your life to an idea that's not worth your life?”