Next to Morning Pages and Artist Dates, the most potent tool for contacting inner guidance and creativity is walking.

Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.

We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.

No matter how sophisticated our lives may be we need to think of ourselves as creative children.

We go into parenting, and we discover that we don't have the answers. We are at a loss.

We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must “log on” somewhere, and if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all. (264)

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.