Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 - March 5, 1985) was a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing

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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.
I learned...that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being re-created.
Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as 'I see where I can make an annual cut of 3.47 in my meat budget.' But they have no slow, big ideas.
Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

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