Orthodox criticism ... is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the first ones to get killed off.

Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.

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.

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

the death of any loved parent is an incalculable lasting blow. Because no one ever loves you again like that.

Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word

it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.