Brenda Ueland

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

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

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.

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. 

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. 

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.