From Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury (a book I love by an author I love):
On Feeding the Muse
"Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.
"Do not, for money, turn away from all the stuff you have collected in a lifetime.
"Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are–the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others."