Duty should be a byproduct.

Be bold, free, and truthful.

All children have creative power.

Consistency is the horror of the world.

Your motto: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self.

Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

You know, I have come to think listening is love, that's what it really is.

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

Inspiration comes to us slowly and quietly . prime it with a little solitude.

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

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

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

We are too ready (women especially) not to stand by what we have said or done.

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.

Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it.

We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision.

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

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

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

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

we like fixed rules because that ends thinking and we can rest. But there is no resting place down here.

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.

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

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

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

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

The true self is always in motion like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.

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

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

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

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

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.

Inspiration does not come like a blot, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly all the time.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.

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

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

... the spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.

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.

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

The only way to write well, so that people believe what we say and are interested or touched by it, is to slough off all pretentiousness and attitudinizing.

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.

If we don't act at all (express our imaginings either in work or a changing personality, so that we can learn and think again something better) we certainly rot.

You Do Not Know Is in You— an Inexhaustible Fountain of Ideas. Another reason for writing a diary is to discover that the ideas in you are an inexhaustible fountain.

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