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

If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.

Even if I knew for certain that I would never have anything published again, and would never make another cent from it, I would still keep on writing.

Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.... Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.