(about William Blake)[Blake] said most of us mix up God and Satan. He said that what most people think is God is merely prudence, and the restrainer and inhibitor of energy, which results in fear...

These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: “I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my...

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

I want to assure you with all earnestness, that no writing is a waste of time, – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you...

I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give...

So you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Don’t always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. “I will not Reason and Compare,” said Blake; “my business is to Create.” Besides, since you are like no other...

At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if...

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

All children have creative power.

Remember William Blake who said: “Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told...

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,–making us think of funnier and funnier things.

…the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e.,...

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they...

I learned… that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day...

(about William Blake)As for Blake’s happiness–a man who knew him said: “If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.”And...

It is so conceited and timid to be ashamed of one’s mistakes. Of course they are mistakes. Go on to the next.

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

The imagination needs moodling,–long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people.

It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.

In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never...

The tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative,...

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:”Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want...

When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap...

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We...

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi–like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth–do not want security, egoistic or...

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.

…writing is not a performance but a generosity.