Nothing Much, Part 1

I seem to have nothing much to say.  (I’m calling this Part 1 in anticipation that this is likely to happen again.)  So I will share from my journal of collected quotations.  This post’s theme: 

Where do your ideas come from?

“Schenectady.” – Harlan Ellison

“The best work that I’ve ever done always has a feeling of having been excavated. I don’t feel like a novelist or a creative writer as much as I feel like an archaeologist who is digging things up and brushing them off and looking at the carvings on them.”  – Stephen King

“I think it must be that a writer touches some nerve, some chord that is close enough to being a universal experience that it jangles in all sorts of other peoples’ inner selves. Where the writer got it, of course, is not from knowing other people so well but from exploring himself… Writers really write for themselves, you know. Each book is a personal question answered or a problem solved.” – Eloise Jarvis McGraw

“A writer of fantasy, fairy tale or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him.” – Madeleine L’Engle

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” – Federico Fellini

“There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.” –Leonard Cohen

“Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

–William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”