Moby Quotes

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you. Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I've ever had grew out of work itself. Sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don't have to invent the wheel everyday. Today you will do what you did yesterday, tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually, you will get somewhere.

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up

Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

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.

One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully.

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

Without the work, the magic won’t come.

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 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.

Keep showing up for your side of the job and give genius a chance to do its part.

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts.

The how-to is all about day in, day out finding a way to feed the monster, the drive that lives inside.

I start a picture and I finish it.

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 one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

When I wrote the opera, I made a deal with myself that for at least an hour a day I would work on it, even if it meant just sitting on my piano bench, staring into space and thinking about it. It's about keeping it regular, like your bowel movements - let's get real: it's your bodily artistic movements! It comes from the same place.

I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.

Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

I am putting every effort toward creating my works from morning till night on every single day.

Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.