I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.
– Ray Bradbury
Most people wait for the muse to turn up. That’s terribly unreliable. I have to sit down and pursue the muse by attempting to work.
– Nick Cave
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I’m midway through a book before it happens. However, I don’t wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I’m not delivering lambs on the farm.
– Barbara Kingsolver
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse.
– Isabel Allende
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
– Plato
I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired to write at 9 o’clock every morning.
– Peter De Vries
What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.
– Ray Bradbury
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, and that is that, not a rat’. And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’
– Maya Angelou
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
– Saul Bellow
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
– Jack London
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
– Ray Bradbury
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
– Stephen King