In the Winter 1981 issue of The Paris Review, Nobel Prize winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez discusses inspiration. (Read the entire interview at The Paris Review.) Here are some excerpts:
I can only work in surroundings that are familiar and have already been warmed up with my work. I cannot write in hotels or borrowed rooms or on borrowed typewriters. This creates problems because when I travel I can’t work…You hope for inspiration whatever the circumstances…
I’m convinced that there is a special state of mind in which you can write with great ease and things just flow. All the pretexts—such as the one where you can only write at home—disappear. That moment and that state of mind seem to come when you have found the right theme and the right ways of treating it. And it has to be something you really like, too, because there is no worse job than doing something you don’t like…
Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one which you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to writing fiction, is a special quality which helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge, or any other special kind of learning…For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it’s contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world—in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition has the advantage that either it is, or it isn’t. You don’t struggle to try to put a round peg into a square hole.
Silver Birch Press 
Wow. Love this. I can relate-every morning I get up, go to my little white desk where all my markers papers and tools are strewn about in a sort of disorganized organization and I illustrate for about 8 hours or more. This is the only place where I can endure and really work for that long. I know it, it’s comfortable, so there’s nothing else to worry about. My brain has room to create and work. It’s the same for me and writing. Sometimes I’ll write down little snippets of story ideas and bits of prose in my journal wherever it is, but when it’s time to buckle down and write the story, I plop myself down on the couch with my journal next to me and my laptop on my lap and I can write for as long as it takes. I had never questioned why it was that way, but of course Marquez is right, he’s a genius! Thanks for sharing.