Mary Engelbreit Quotes

We all have fertile creative periods and times when we can't figure out how we ever did it.

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.'

The artist is inherently a romantic to some degree, and as such, I believe in a muse. But I don't try to analyze too much where it comes from.

But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.

Inspiration and creativity, they ride right next to one anotherNot everyday are you going to wake up, the clouds are gonna part and the rays are gonna come downsometimes you gotta just get in there and force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out of it.

A lot of things trigger my inspiration. It can be the most banal things.

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.

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

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.

I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.

Sometimes ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.

The professional is acutely aware of the intangibles that go into inspiration. Out of respect for them, she lets them work. She grants them their sphere while she concentrates on hers.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.

When you start to engage with your creative processes, it shakes up all your impulses, and they all kind of inform one another.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

If I knew where creativity came from, I'd probably be a lot less stressed about coming up with new stories.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

That's the beauty of creativity. It comes from the ether. I like to think, sometimes, it's like I haven't written it, it's more like I just reached up and grabbed it from somewhere. That song, 'Song of the Red Rock Mountain,' is one of them. I recorded it and thought, 'Where did that come from?'

Sitting around and waiting for your muse is not the best choice.