Brenda Ueland

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.

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 being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.

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

Everybody is talented original and has something important to say.

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

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

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

Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented having the most imagination and sympathy these are the first ones to get killed off.

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

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 to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out."And if you have no such friend,--and you want to write,--well, then you must imagine one.

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

In true courage there is always an element of choice of an ethical choice and of anguish and also of action and deed. There is always a flame of spirit in it a vision of some necessity higher than oneself.

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

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

(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 and passivity and "imaginative death."And what we so often call "reason" and think is so fine, is not intelligence or understanding at all, but just this: it is arguing from our *memory* and the sensations of our body and from the warnings of other people, that if we do such and such a thing we will be uncomfortable. "It won't pay." "People will think it is silly." "No one else does it." "It is immoral."But the only way you can grow in understanding and discover whether a thing is good or bad, Blake says, is to do it. "Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."For this "Reason" as Blake calls it (which is really just caution) continually nips and punctures and shrivels the imagination and the ardor and the freedom and the passionate enthusiasm welling up in us. It is Satan, Blake said. It is the only enemy of God. "For nothing is pleasing to God except the invention of beautiful and exalted things." And when a prominent citizen of his time, a logical, opining, erudite, measured, rationalistic, Know-it-all, warned people against "mere enthusiasm," Blake wrote furiously (he was a tender-hearted, violent and fierce red-haired man): "Mere enthusiasm is the All in All!

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