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From Blue Pastures:

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration,
without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye
watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does
not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace,
to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from
another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self,
that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself,
splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say?
That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your
uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course, Then
you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled
back into the mist.

Mary Oliver