Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Inside the Painter's Studio, Joe Fig, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, p. 42
Untitled essay, reprinted in Arthur Lawrence Sir Arthur Sullivan: Life-story, Letters and Reminiscences (London: James Bowden, 1899) p. 225.
Source: Words and Pictures
(in his first-ever interview, 1991) source http://www.followmearound.com/presscuttings.php?year=1991&cutting=10
From the Q&A section (found July 2010) http://www.philip-pullman.com/q_a.asp?offset=60
Pullman's website
Context: If you're going to make a living at this business - more importantly, if you're going to write anything that will last - you have to realise that a lot of the time, you're going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but the interesting thing is to look at the private journals and letters of great writers and see how much of the time they just had to do without inspiration. Conrad, for example, groaned at the desperate emptiness of the pages he faced; and yet he managed to cover them. Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they'd be amateurs.
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (2012), Chapter 15 (p. 319)
What is to be Done? (1902)
“We get up and go to work, we get up and go to church, and we get up and go to war when necessary.”
2007 CMT Awards
Context: Country music is about new love and it's about old love. It's about gettin' drunk and gettin' sober. It's about leavin' and it's about comin' home. It's real music sung by real people for real people, the people that make up the backbone of this country. You can call us rednecks if you want. We're not offended, 'cause we know what we're all about. We get up and go to work, we get up and go to church, and we get up and go to war when necessary.
