To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life — Muses

"Whether on Ida’s shady brow Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From antient melody have ceas’d;Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air Where the melodious winds have birth;Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea, Wand’ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!How have you left the antient love That bards of old enjoy’d in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!"

"The mother of the Muses, we are taught, Is Memory: she has left me; they remain, And shake my shoulder, urging me to sing About the summer days, my loves of old."

"The ancient Greek "oral poets" all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the muse to help them remember. The invocation of the muses may have been a purely formal element by the time we encounter it, but it very likely reflected a real sense of the anxiety that the memory of forgetting could induce in a sensitive artist of an "oral society."

"When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!"

"It is through the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that there are singers and harpers upon the earth; but princes are of Zeus, and happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his mouth. For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all ; but the gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these."

"The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase, Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on, Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire By little whimpering boy, with rueful face— Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day."