Writers Recommend

“I take inspiration from the subtle daily forecasting of death. This should be impetus for anyone to get off his ass. Work is why we're here, and to waste an hour of any day, fretting or worrying or procrastinating, is to release into the air the odor of death. Emerson said, ‘To fill the hour—that is happiness.’ I try to fill the hour. And by filling the hour, the ones that follow come easier. Inspiration, then, is its own inspiration. But I must beware of why I work. ‘You have the right to work,’ it’s written in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘but for the work's sake only.’ And a little later: ‘Those who work selfishly for results are miserable.’ Here's inspiration, and good advice as well. And should the greatest fear come to pass, that I die in the middle of writing a novel? For that I have the comfort of Rabbi Tarphon's advice in the Saying of the Fathers: ‘It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.’”
—Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed (Arthur Books, 2010)

“As Jerome Washington wrote, 'The blues is our antidote.’ So I listen. Blues doctors like Neal Pattman inspire something in a writer’s blood. Anyone who can play harmonica like he can, with one arm no less, will get me going. And inevitably my sons will hear 'Momma Whoopin’ Blues’ and start asking questions. I show them the CD cover and they ask more questions and I explain how he lost his arm in a wagon wheel accident as a boy and they ask even more questions. Our give-and-take reveals my sons to be beautifully strange, loving, and profound little fellows, even if they are six years old and younger. The blues is my antidote. The mind of a child is everything else.”
—Glenn Taylor, author of The Marrowbone Marble Company (Ecco, 2010)

“José Martí wrote, ‘In the world there must be certain degrees of honor just as there must be certain degrees of light. When there are many men without honor, there are always others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.’ What inspires me are the men and women who bear in themselves the ‘honor’ of survival—men like the brothers I taught at Graterford Prison, reconnoitering their lives after having fought in Vietnam; young mothers dragging their children around corners of fatigue at the end of the day, looking neither left nor right. What inspires me is how we make one another see ourselves as we rise up to tell our stories. And survive. What inspires me, I guess, are women—from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, South America, the Middle East, Europe, America. So listen to our talk, walk, accents, smiles, silences, songs.”
—Sonia Sanchez, author of Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010)

"Nothing inspires me like the imagination in a vacuum. I always pick the most closet-like, even coffin-like, space in the house for my writing room. No windows, no photos, no 'stuff.' I never play any music, I don't have an inspiration board, I disable the internet, and the cell is always off. The outside world is far too tempting. If I go out for a run, suddenly the body is of paramount concern; if I listen to my favorite music, I won't be able to shake the imprints out of my head; if I watch a great movie, I'm seduced by images. I have to stay put with my project when I'm with-project. Fortunately, my projects always require little research and much imagination work—maybe memory excavation at best. But if you're going to ask kids to finger paint, you don't put Van Gogh's ‘Sunflowers' before them. They don't need Erik Satie. They don't need a long jog. They don't require a Quote of the Day from Rilke. There is no need to warm up. What made me fall in love with writing in the first place was that we have all the equipment we need in us—we don't need anything else."
—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007)