Alberich: Alan, was there any specific inspiration for the Mara in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen?
Have you used this book as specific inspiration for a cover?
SPECIFIC INSPIRATION "I was curious about what happens to the wives and children of notorious people," Ms. Peet said.
She also admitted a specific inspiration: a "blondish woman in a fur coat", who wafted into Macy's in New York to buy her daughter a doll.
And finally, citing Jobs as a specific inspiration, he told his screaming audience that "everything around us that we call life was made up people who were no smarter than you… so build a life, don't live one.
The new album draws specific inspiration from Mr. Picker's mother, an artist afflicted by mental illness, who took her own life shortly after attending his wedding in 2009.
His most specific inspiration was Hieronymus Bosch's painting "Christ Mocked (the Crowning With Thorns)," circa 1490-1500, in the National Gallery in London, along with Mantegna's "Adoration of the Magi" (circa 1495-1505) in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Dieric Bouts's "Mater Dolorosa" (circa 1460) in the Art Institute of Chicago.
He got some very specific inspiration from a book, "Seventy Years of Time Magazine" that chronicled how Time's founder, Henry Luce, built his magazine publishing empire, a story that inspired Mr. Shao to strive to be a sort of Chinese Luce — ironic, given Luce's famous animosity to China's Communists.
SPECIFIC INSPIRATION "What I wanted to do," Mr. Blessing told a video interviewer, "is examine my concept, and other people's concepts, of the afterlife — hell specifically — and I imagine that I chose Bernie Madoff because, you know, if there's anyone we can theoretically presume maybe going to hell, should there actually be a hell, Bernie would be a pretty universal candidate".
SPECIFIC INSPIRATION Mr. Levenson has said that the story is based on the father of a high school friend, a prominent Washington lawyer who went to jail for white-collar crime: "It made me wonder what it must be like for her father, who had recently been released from prison, how impossible a task to try to rebuild all that you've lost, to start over".
