Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

There is a connection between self-nurturing and self-respect.

Perfectionism doesn't believe in practice shots. It doesn't believe in improvement. Perfectionism has never heard that anything worth doing is worth doing badly--and that if we allow ourselves to do something badly we might in time become quite good at it. Perfectionism measures our beginner's work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn't know how to say, "Good try," or "Job well done." The critic does not believe in creative glee--or any glee at all, for that matter. No, perfectionism is a serious matter.

We are not accustomed to thinking that God's will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide.

When writing becomes too dominant, it gets leached of its own power. We spend more and more time writing and we have less and less to write about.