Ernest Newman Quotes

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

There's nothing romantic about my work... I don't believe in inspiration. I believe that you get to your desk, you stay there, you work, you think of nothing else. You write and you write, and in the end, you write something good.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

Discipline is the servant of inspiration.

I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working.

There's no secret, but inspiration has to find you working. And that's one of the key things that I've always remembered. And if I put my mind to it tonight, I think I could take a guitar, and by 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, something will have happened - I'll have had something to hang onto. But I think that's the key.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Amateurs wait for inspiration. The real pros get up and go to work.

If I waited for inspiration every time I sat down to write a song I probably would be a plumber today.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

I am very, very diligent and extremely hard-working.

I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.

Do the day's work.

I write fifteen hours a day, stopping at Oprah-o'clock.

I don't wait for inspiration. I'm not, in fact, quite sure what inspiration is, but I'm sure that if it is going to turn up, my having started work is the precondition of its arrival.

What gets projects done for me is not inspiration. It's curiosity and rigor.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.

Without the work, the magic won’t come.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.