Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just had a  three hour nap (went to bed late) and I asked Bill if he came up and sat by the bed. I was sure he did. He denied it. So that proves it was a dream. I also dreamed I was swimming with tropical fish in a backyard pond.

The fun of it for me is when I get to the fifth or sixth draft. Then I can play with possibilities. The first draft is like breaking rocks.
LEWIS LAPHAM

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author. 

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

How did you become a writer?

Well, like a lot of writers, I'm mentally ill. To become a writer, you need drive and you need practice, and the drive to escape something -- whether it's inside your brain or outside -- is a great way to make sure you get the practice. But pure escapism will only get you so far. You'll burn out that way, and run out of ideas, and you won't learn to build a practice. At a certain point, we have to learn to care for ourselves in ways other than writing, so that writing can be a sustainable lifelong practice. It's like how a singer needs to learn not to force their voice through their throat, but instead to use their whole body to support the sound. We become writers by learning to support it. Isaac Fellman

Working with a farmer in Schwanenstadt in 1946, I saw how brown the earth was and how green the grass and decided to become a painter.  

― Friedensreich Hundertwasser   (1928-2000) 

If we do not honor our past, we lose our future. If we destroy our roots, we cannot grow.  

― Friedensreich Hundertwasser           

You are a guest of nature - behave.    ― Friedensreich Hundertwasser   

If one person dreams alone... It is only a dream. When many people dream together... It is the beginning of a new reality.  ― Friedensreich Hundertwasser 

A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
― Friedensreich Hundertwasser 

I am allergic to spring but I hate those 24 hour allergy meds because they make me feel trapped in a submarine claustrophobic and dehydrated. Let me out! Let me out! I'd rather suffer a little and know I am at the helm and can choose to take more medicine or tough it out.

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

― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

The true self is always in motion - like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

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.
― Brenda Ueland

I want to assure you with all earnestness, that 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. It has stretched your understanding.
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk, to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: 'Tell me more.' This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive.' ...Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.
― Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings

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.
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

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.
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

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. I have done this for many years. It is at these times I seem to get re-charged. If I do not walk one day, I seem to have on the next what van Gogh calls "the meagerness.""The meagerness," he said, "or what is called depression." After a day or two of not walking, when I try to write I feel a little dull and irresolute. For a long time I thought that the dullness was just due to the asphyxiation of an indoor, sedentary life (which all people who do not move around a great deal in the open air suffer from, though they do not know it).

 ― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

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

― Brenda Ueland

We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

  “...writing is not a performance but a generosity.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit 

“Creative power flourishes only when I am living in the present.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit  

“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.”
― Brenda Ueland

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

― Ray Bradbury

If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or, "I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore…" Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.

-Ray Bradbury, speech to Brown University