Brenda Ueland said this quote

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.

~ Brenda Ueland

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

~ Brenda Ueland

...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.

~ Brenda Ueland

(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy....He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.

~ Brenda Ueland