Inspiration
Neal Stephenson was inspired to write The Baroque Cycle when, while working on Cryptonomicon, he encountered a statement by George Dyson in Darwin Among the Machines that suggests Leibniz was "arguably the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines." He also had heard considerable discussion of the Leibniz – Newton feud and Newton's work at the treasury during the last 30 years of his life. He found "this information striking when was already working on a book about money and a book about computers." Further research into the period excited Stephenson and he embarked on writing the historical piece that became The Baroque Cycle.
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Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)