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.
Brenda Ueland
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.
people ideas busy big meat budget
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergartenhappy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
writing feel child mountain lord learned
idleness chance inspiration solitude time day start striving learned give
All children have creative power.
power children creative
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 peace creativity day walk learned
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
force listening people creative listen strange tired thing
The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.
life world things eat drink important love
It is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come.
inside
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
imagination happy
This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
original important learned
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.
original writing truth art
In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.
inspiration listening writing people faith art appreciation good praise laughing encourage write lucky richness intelligent love aware
At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
writing people truth art creativity writing-life feeling impulse share hear give
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.
writing friends critics freedom
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