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 it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you are interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny.

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 it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

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

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.