Brenda Ueland

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

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

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 it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

All children have creative power.

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

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love, and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.

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 meat budget. But they have no slow, big ideas.

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.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this rechargesus so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.

So you see, imagination needs moodlinglong, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.