Johnstone on Inspiration:

>An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He's not making any decisions, he's not weighing one idea against another. He's accepting his first thoughts. How else could Dostoyevsky have dictated one novel in the morning and one in the afternoon for three weeks in order to fulfil his contracts? If you consider the volume of work produced by Bach then you get some idea of his fluency (and we've lost half of it), yet a lot of his time was spent rehearsing, and teaching Latin to the choirboys. According to Louis Schlosser, Beethoven said: 'You ask me where I get my ideas? That I can't say with any certainty. They come unbidden, directly, I could grasp them with my hands.' Mozart said of his ideas: 'Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those that please me I retain in the memory, and I am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them.' Later in the same letter he says: 'Why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or in short, makes it Mozart's, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality.'<

Keith Johnstone

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Im Deutschen könnte man Inspiration auch als einen Zustand der Begeisterung bezeichnen. Begeisterung lässt sich nicht herbeizwingen. In der Begeisterung strömen die Ideen, oder die Worte von den Lippen, und es kommt einem kaum vor, als ob man anders denken oder sprechen könnte. Für Momente oder Zeitspannen wird die kritische Distanz zu Gedanken oder Worten aufgehoben.