Michelle Paver Quotes

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

I'm of the ilk of writers that feels you have to be open to the inspiration.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I think we writers are very superstitious. We don't know why it's working when it's working, so we attach cause and effect.

I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens - something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.

I've learnt that the muse is like an angry girlfriend. If she comes knocking you better be home because if you're not, she doesn't leave a note saying pick up after 3 P. M. from the post office. The gift she had is gone forever.

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.'

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

I think good artists know when they're on a roll, and they recognize when lightning is striking. It's a very fortunate thing to have that inspiration and not to overanalyze it or mess with it; you just follow it if you love what you do.

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.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

Writing is a funny thing. It's not like you're working on a schedule. It comes in fits and starts.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while 'Foster the People' plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work.

I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

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.

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

There's an element to songwriting that I can't explain, that comes from somewhere else. I can't explain that dividing line between nothing and something that happens within a song, where you have absolutely nothing, and then suddenly you have something. It's like the origin of the universe.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.