If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write. If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down little ideas no matter how insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude.

The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

To have the external pressure of a job removed is very astonishing. Your own will is now your only motor and it has no horse-power. Sometimes I think that perhaps the most competent business men, and lawyers and doctors, who must be at the office at nine o'clock every morning, do not realize this and take more credit for initiative and industry than they deserve. And it is why all the bright women of the world, who if more were expected of them, might do important work, but who instead have a chronic feeling of ineffectiveness and sloth.

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

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

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

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