Quotes of the muse and inspiration

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