Brenda Ueland
“Be careless, reckless! Be a lion! Be a pirate!”
“No one can help you write the way you write.”
“We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product.”
“Everyone is talented, original and has something important to say.”
“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.”
“The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you... "Tell me more. Tell me all you can."”
“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.”
“Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you.”
“...writing is not a performance but a generosity.”
“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."”
“No writing is a waste of time — no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.”
“Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself.”
“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.”
“The imagination needs moodling,—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.”