There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or pa….

... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and ….

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

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

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….

... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies w….

... 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..

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

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..

When we commit ourselves to writing for some part of each day, we are happier, more enlightened, alive, light-hearted and generous to everyone else. ….

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

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The tru….

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

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

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

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

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,….

Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw ….

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

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

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