Moby believes the mundane aspects of ritualized work increase the chance that something great might happen.

Moby: The biggest thrill of what I do is not knowing where inspiration comes from.  And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so prolific, is because I feel like as long as I keep working, it increases the chances that inspiration might happen.  So I write a lot of music, and a lot of it’s pretty mundane. And a lot of it’s not very good.  But every now and then, something that I think is really spectacular will happen.  And if I’m not in my studio working on music, there is no way that I’ll be able to capture that.  But as long as I just stay in my studio and keep working and working and sort of like slogging through, you know, the mundane aspects of just day-to-day, ritualized working, that just increases the chances that something great might happen.  The one thing I’m doing when inspiration hits is I’m sitting in my studio playing guitar or playing keyboards or sitting in front of the computer.  But as long as I’m there, that way I can capture it and I can document it.  And it becomes sort of almost like an ascetic, monastic vocation.  You know?  Like it’s just me alone in my small studio, which is sort of like a monastic cell.  And I at some point . . .  I mean, they’ll do document . . . documentaries on musicians.  Like a behind the music on the dramatic things that are involved in making a record.  And for me it would be the most tedious documentary in the world because it’s just me sitting in a chair in front of a computer or in front of a keyboard, and there’s really not a lot going on.